ii Btkalf of « « 

Eargt r and more ^optful 
Ww of Oft * * 



B J 








JUL2018M 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap.J^_„ Copyright JS T o.„ 

Shelf_2l^fc„. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 






BY THE SAME AUTHOR: 

Mooted Questions of History. 

New York : Benziger Bros., Publishers. 
Handsomely bound in cloth, 220 pp., 75 cents. 



Quite a valuable little book which compiles 
the data of history and the judgment of histo- 
rians fairly supposed to be free from bias re- 
garding events which popularly receive a one- 
sided treatment.— American Eccl. Eeview. 



The Church and The Law. 

WITH SPECIAL EEFEEENCB TO ECCLESIASTICAL 
LAW IN THE UNITED STATES. 



Chicago: Callaghan & Co., Law Book Pub- 
lishers. Bound in sheep, $1.00. 



"Will be found instructive upon the topics 
treated not only by laymen and clergymen, but 
by lawyers. . . Mr. Desmond was one of the 
attorneys who argued and filed a learned brief 
in the celebrated Edgerton Bible case and was 
well prepared to write such a book. I cheerfully 
commend it to those who wish information on 
the subject.— Hon. J. B. Cassoday, Chief Justice 
of the Supreme Court of Wisconsin, 



Outlooks 
>d Insights. 



an< 



In JSebalf of larger an& fiDore 
Hopeful Wewa of Xtfe, 



By Humphrey J. Desmond. 



"Care not, while we hear 
A trumpet in the distance pealing news 
Of better, and Hope, a poising eagle, burns 
Above the unrisen morrow." 

—Tennyson. 



New Yoke Chicago 

D. H. McBRIDE & CO., Publishers, 

1899. 



*$« 



38350 



Copyright, 1899. 
By H. J. Desmond. 






f 






m 



4J MrU^ 
W Via ^ <\ 



CONTENTS. 



Above the Sordid- 



Ossification. - 

Side Lines. 

What a Monk Wrote. 

Keep Sweet. .... 

An Un-austere Saint. 

A Happy Disposition. 

Seeing Life. 

As a Man Lives — 

The Ruling Passion. 

Small Vices. .... 

Even Worldlings See It. 

Sane Insanities. 

The Anti-Social Feeling. 

Turning Points. 

The Philosophy of Moderation- 

The Flying Years. *~- 

Would We Live Our Lives Over Again? 

Something Must be Missed. 

A False Aim. 

The Measure of Success. - 

Spiritual Force — 

The Will To Do. 

Be Just and Fear Not. 

The Kernel of Progress. - 

Courage of Conviction — 

In the Living Present, 

Right, Rather than Popularity. 

"Respectable" Opinions. 

Avant Couriers. - 

The Brave Man Chooses. 

s 



PAGE. 

7 
7 
8 
8 
9 

- 10 
12 
13 

- 16 
16 

- 17 

18 

- 18 
20 

- 21 

24 

- 24 

26 

- 27 

28 

- 30 

33 

■ 33 
34 

- 37 

40 

- 40 
41 

. 42 
44 

- 46 



CONTENTS. 



Now is the Appointed Time- 



page. 

48 

Get Into Action. ----- 48 

To-morrow and To-morrow and To-morrow. 49 
Action is Power. ----- 50 



The Society of the Energetic— 

Daring to Do. . - . - 

The Discipline of Mind. 
Prescience. .... 

The Opportune Moment. - 

Suaviter in Modo — 

Serenity. - - - - 

Morbid Periods. 
The Impolicy of Quarrels. 
The Art of Persuasion. 

The Point of View— 

The Poet's Eye. - 

The Habit of Satire. 

Shapes of Vice. - 

Not All One Way. 

The Wisdom of Our Elders. 

Perspectives— 

Narrow-Guage Statesmen. 
Radicalism. - 
Time for the Puritan. - 
A Lesson in Public Spirit. 
"Only a Sentiment." 



Attitudes- 



Power in Repose. 

One's Own Individuality. 

Signs of Character. 



Recurrences— 



New Causes. 
"Paramount Eights." 
Lost Arts. - 

Reverence. 



52 
52 
53 
54 
56 

60 



63 
65 

67 

67 
69 
71 
73 
74 

76 
76 

78 
79 
81 



87 



92 
95 
97 



4 



CONTENTS. 




PAGB. 


The Knowledge of Evil— - 


101 


A Question of Innocence. 


101 


An Apostolic Caution. 


■ 102 


Degenerate Tendencies. 


103 


The Black Art. .... 


. 105 


Enlarging Vistas— - 


108 


The Unfinished Bible. 


■ 108 


Hush! Hush! 


109 


In God's Time. .... 


• Ill 


"Think Ye?" 


112 


Theological Insularity. 


■ 114 


Ideas in the Pulpit. - - - 


116 


Repairs on the Church* 


118 


The Gospel for the Poor — 


121 


Moral Sanitation. - 


• 121 


The Poor We Have Always With Us 


123 


A Civilization of Water. - 


• 125 


After Dinner Charity. .... 


128 


Mediaeval Charity. - 


• 128 


, Education in Giving. .... 


130 


Brains and Heart. - 


- 132 


Americanism — 


■ 134 


What is Americanism? 


134 


A Matter of Environment. 


. 137 


Beyond Their Station. 


139 


Rise in the World. - - - - 


■ 143 


The People King — - 


147 


Ordinary People. 


- 147 


A Lesson in Ethics- - - 


149 


Level Up. - 


151 


The Hard Pacts — - 


155 


A Balance of Power. .... 


155 


The Boycott Family. - 


157 


Cannot Use the Church. .... 


159 



Outlooks and Insights. 

ABOVE THE SOEDID. 

Ossification. When we grow old the veins and 
arteries harden. The muscles grow 
stiff. The lungs and the heart are 
clogged with limy deposits. If some 
means could be discovered to rid the 
body of waste material, or some diet 
followed which would throw less work 
upon the excretory organs, most of us 
might reach the century mark. 

But we also ossify in our minds and 
in our souls. While there are experi- 
ences in life which chasten and purify 
— and sorrow which does not crush, is 
one of these — there are routines in life, 
ways of living and sordid aims which 
destroy every God-given sympathy, rob 
the mind of all its generous impulses, 
cramp the soul and drive all poetry and 
beauty out of life. What does the social 
or political or pecuniary success, which 
leaves us thus ossified in brain and 
soul, amount to ? To be hard of heart, 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

calculating of mind and iron-willed, is 
simply a condition of moral death. 

Side Lines. Mrs. Browning in one of her poems 
says : 

"Let us be content in work, 
To do the thing we can and not presume 
To fret because 'tis little." 

There is, however, a chance for every 
one, no matter what may be the ordi- 
nary duties of life, to develop little in- 
terests aside from avocations by which 
one's living is earned. In his Wilhelm 
Meister, Goethe says: "One ought 
every day, at least, to hear a little song, 
read a good poem, see a fine picture, 
and, if it were possible, speak a few 
reasonable words." Some people are so 
happily constituted that they are able 
to go out of their way to do an act of 
kindness every day. 

Monk* A monk wrote these lines away back 

Wrote. ^ n ^ e «<i ar k ages," when, it is alleged, 

that monks did nothing but segregate: 

"Count that day lost 
Whose low descending sun 
Views from your hand 
No worthy action done." 

What St. Bernard wrote, old John 
Brown, of Ossowatomie, taught to his 
8 



ABOVE THE SORDID. 

children, and Wendell Phillips copied 
in a thousand autograph albums. 

The sentiment is good, wholesome 
and instructive. Each day has its 
duties, be they little or great. That 
which we esteem the least may turn 
out to be the most important. Some- 
times a single word comes up to St. 
Bernard's idea of a worthy action. 
Sometimes it is a chance lift volun- 
teered to one in difficulty. Sometimes 
it is a good resolution. Sometimes it 
is a temptation resisted. The field is 
broad and open to all. Everybody may 
write the monk's lines in his memoran- 
dum book. 



Bweef ^ UR Christianity ought to enable us 
to come up after the struggles and dis- 
appointments and crosses of each day, 
sweet tempered and smiling. It makes 
a great difference with our career and 
it makes a great difference with our 
character. 

The "slings and arrows of outrageous 
fortune" glance off the smooth sur- 
faced temper of him who preserves his 
digestion and his merriment and his 
courtesy even when matters seem to go 
9 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

adversely and difficulties are impend- 
ing. 

Earnestness is good and gravity is 
good, but not at the expense of Chris- 
tian kindness. And Christian kind- 
ness should exist not as an act of pen- 
ance, but as the spontaneous expres- 
sion of a healthy character. The poet 
cries 

"Give me the man who sings at his work." 

And give us the Christian associates 
who, after their work is done, are 
neither dull nor irritable nor indolent, 
but who have a wish for the bright 
things of life (while there is faith in 
them) and an irradiating vital good 
temper. 

The will to cultivate such a temper is 
gradually served by the habit until it 
becomes second nature ; so that a happy 
disposition — upon which so much of 
the enjoyment of life depends — is 
quite as much a matter of acquisition 
as a gift of nature. 



Un-Austere " He was £*$> g enial and irresistibly 
Saint. winning." Words spoken of St. Philip 
Neri, who walked the streets of Rome 
some three hundred years ago. 
10 



ABOVE THE SORDID. 

Sad people went out of their way to 
meet him, for the sight of his face made 
them happy. It is said that after his 
death, depressed people went to his 
room to have their hearts raised. His 
presence was sunshine. His very look 
calmed troubled souls. His words in- 
spired confidence. His step was the 
signal of good cheer. 

All this is quite credible. It should 
seem plausible to us in these days when 
there is belief in personal magnetism. 
Have we not all observed in a less de- 
gree the influence, either for gladness or 
depression, of certain individualities ? 

What a power for good a man gifted 
as was St. Phillip Xeri might be. How 
much better employed is this happy 
endowment when it is devoted to the 
welfare of one's fellow Christians 
rather than to winning office or trade. 
St. Phillip Xeri was eighty years of age 
when he died, and at his death and all 
through his life we may believe that he 
gained more satisfaction in using his 
great gifts in diffusing happiness, than 
if he had ruled the Papal court or sat 
as a prince among Venetian merchants. 



11 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

Disposition. Life in its totality is both sad and 
glad. But it is gladder and brighter 
with those who determine to make it so. 
A happy disposition is worth half one's 
fortune in life. Things do seem to 
come out right in the end for those who 
look away from the gloom, keep up 
their courage and trust to the good 
time coming and the kind Providence 
that watches over all. 

If we study the processes of the mind, 
we begin to be more and more per- 
suaded that nothing in life is irremedi- 
able or irretrievable. Time seems to 
cure the deepest afflictions. The wor- 
ries of yesterday are trifles to the mem- 
ory of to-morrow. A merciful Creator 
has so constituted us that we rise from 
the profoundest grief to bear with forti- 
tude the saddest bereavements. A lost 
love finds balm in the treasure house 
of the future. What seems the awful 
decree of Fate, which rives hearts and 
makes the years to come seem black and 
bleak and cold and desolate, is less 
awful and less tragic as the months 
roll on. Men smile again, though their 
fortunes are broken, though poverty 
succeeds affluence, and though obscur- 
ity follows power. Every cloud has a 
12 



ABOVE THE SORDID. 

silver lining. The darkest hour is the 
hour before the. dawn. 

These considerations and this knowl- 
edge of the recuperative power of the 
mind, advise us of the good sense of 
looking on the bright side. Let us raise 
our hearts. We may be happy yet. 
The sun is still shining, if we but get 
in the sunlight. Eeturning seasons 
still new flowers bring. After all, 'tis 
a good old world to live in. And our 
faith is that we were created to be 
happy, and not to be miserable in it. 

So much of the unhappiness of life 
comes from being morbid over afflic- 
tions and crosses. It is the mistake of 
looking on the gloomy side only. The 
evil of the bereavement and the sadness, 
are deepened by brooding, and the sor- 
row sometimes leads to catastrophe and 
tragedy. What is needed are physi- 
cians of the mind to prescribe diver- 
sion, hard work, new interests, and 
more sunlight. 



Seeing ^ famous German writer has aptly 

said, "You must treat a work of art 

like a great man. Stand before it, and 

wait patiently till it deigns to speak." 

13 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

In the art galleries people stand for 
a long time before some famous paint- 
ing. New beauties and finer lines are 
constantly revealed to them. It has 
taken the artist, a long time to execute 
his great work. He has put his heart 
and soul into the creation, and we can- 
not expect to appreciate or understand 
it if we simply give it a passing glance. 

If there are hidden meanings in life 
we do not see them by haste in any 
manner — whether in hurried travel or 
in eager pursuit of wealth. There are 
more beauties — there is more "soul" — 
in the relations cultivated by a good 
Christian life and in the duties it in- 
volves than can be revealed in the great- 
est work of art. The painter, after 
some 3 r ears of labor, exhibits his mas- 
terpiece on canvas. But the active and 
useful life of twenty or forty years has 
its masterpiece in the character formed 
and developed; and one may see in its 
acts and its thoughts, its self-denials 
and its heroism, something more ad- 
mirable than any art gallery possesses. 

Let us not hurry through the corri- 
dors of time without appreciating what 
is good and true and beautiful in char- 



14 



ABOVE THE SORDID. 



acter, and let us develop those human 
sympathies and , that Christian faith 
that give life its nobility. 



15 



AS A MAN LIVES. 

Ru!m ^ HE blacksmith's arm is developed 
Passion. t a fi ne proportion because he uses it ; 
the dancer's leg or the cycler's calf 
comes to be, what it is, by use. The 
blood flows where it is called. As with 
the muscles, so with the brain. 

If the brain is used to write poetry, 
the brain development is poetic; if to 
plan benevolence, it takes on the benev- 
olent aspect, even to the face. If we 
think good thoughts we show them in 
our faces; if evil thoughts, depravity 
looks out of our eyes — and with the 
strength of these parts, grows the dis- 
position as well as the facility. 

Gamblers so attune their nervous sys- 
tems that they cannot be comfortable 
unless they are playing at some game 
of chance for some stake. The lecher 
is sent along by his insane wit to the 
excitements and incitements of liber- 
tinism. This is what is meant by the 
expression, "possessed by one's sin," 
"the ruling passion strong in death." 
It is a fearful fact, not fully realized 
16 



AS A MAN LIVES. 

until men are in the maelstrom of their 
own evil natures.. A man thus builds 
up the tendency of his own life by the 
way he lives it. And as he lives, so is 
he apt to die. 



vices! ^ HE avera g e man i g n °t a bad fellow. 
His vices are usually the small vices. 
He does not see them himself in their 
pettiness. Few men act on the philoso- 
pher's surnma of human wisdom: 
"know thyself/' They can't perceive 
their weak vanity, their sneaking lust 
or their mean avarice; simply because 
the outcroppings are in small and not 
in gross vices. 

Society is sometimes shocked by the 
fall of men currently held in high 
esteem. It is wondered how one of 
such heretofore irreproachable life 
could thus sin. But the answer is 
found in the existence of small vices. 
They who pinched the poor of their 
dues were already far advanced in dis- 
honesty, and they who went voyaging 
out upon the sea of a guilty imagina- 
tion were already whited sepulchres of 
corruption. 

If 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

Woddii Men of evil lives are not wise to plan 
See it. or shrewd in action. "A heart to re- 
solve, a head to contrive and a hand to 
execute" co-exist only in those who live 
in accordance with right mental, moral 
and physical laws. 

The old saying, "Whom the gods de- 
stroy they first drive mad," means that 
those who encounter wreck and ruin are 
chiefly responsible for it themselves. 
Their evil temper, their reckless actions 
and their foolish vagaries constitute 
their madness. 

A sensualist is never a good busi- 
ness man. A drunkard is a poor poli- 
tician. A libertine is always a social 
failure. Any moral weakness corrupts 
the whole mental and physical system. 

"Errors in morals breed errors in the brain, 
And these, reciprocally, these again." 

In the great affairs of life all wise 
decision and prudent action should be 
based on right living. The mental and 
moral vision should be normal. Nerves 
should be natural and the environment 
wholesome. Otherwise we labor under 
the stress of unwise circumstances. 



Sane ; m Some experts on the question of in- 
'sanity hold that there are kinds of 
18 



AS A MAN LIVES. 

sanity more disagreeable, dangerous 
and anti-social than some of the insani- 
ties cooped up in asylums. 

Where avarice and miserliness run in 
a family, resulting in sordid lives, rack- 
renting landlords and bitter family 
feuds over property, it is a question 
whether this is not a curse both to the 
family and to the community infested 
by such a family, far worse than 
mental imbecility or the tendency to 
senile dementia. 

There are some families which 
spawn their progeny upon society with 
the inevitable consequence that the 
sons must "sow their wild oats" before 
they settle down to decent living. In 
the process, there are saddened homes, 
broken hearts and ruined lives. This 
species of heredity moral unsoundness 
is a worse infliction on society, and per- 
haps a worse heritage to the individuals 
concerned, than actual mental insta- 
bility. 

What of the cranks, the hopelessly 
impracticables, the fanatics, the bigots, 
and id genus omne? They are all in- 
flictions upon society and all measur- 
ablv victims of a deformed mental or 



19 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

moral constitution — although their de- 
formity is not actual insanity. 

Christianity, in the mild, even tem- 
pered and kind spirit of its Great 
Pounder, is the true sanitary force 
tending to dissolve the mental and 
moral deformities that afflict society 
and to make us all gentlemen and gen- 
tlewomen in the true sense — consider- 
ate, kind, upright, with our angles 
rounded off and our idiosyncrasies 
smoothed away. 



4 Anti : Sociai Insanity in its final analysis is an 
anti-social feeling — war against the 
saner usages and desires of the com- 
munity. 

Want of social sympathy is a mild 
form of insanity. The eccentric who 
growls at the approach of his fellow- 
man: the unneighborly who takes 
pleasure in being disagreeable: the so- 
cially isolated who repels rather than 
attracts communication, are of this 
class. 

Easy associations with one's neigh- 
bors, affability of expression and 
smoothness of manner denote sanity. 
Pleasant greetings, the taking of a per- 



AS A MAN LIVES. 

sonal interest in others, congeniality 
of companionships, politeness, defer- 
ence and courtesy are qualities which fit 
people rightfully in the social sphere. 
Society gives such people strength, and 
they in turn strengthen society. 



Points 15 ^ E a ^ reac k turning points in life — 
times when events and reasons concur 
in urging a change of course — possibly 
a complete reversal of our previous 
direction, possibly a turning off from 
former aims to newer ends which seem 
to us wiser and better. 

Under the influence of certain 
motives a man has concluded that his 
happiness lies in attaining special con- 
ditions — such as a fair degree of 
wealth, or eminence in a profession, or 
the applause of his village as an orator, 
or a pleasant home life, or a political 
position. But along in the toil of 
attainment a higher wisdom than that 
of his youth comes to him, and what 
was gilded seems now paltry, and what 
he thought of with a zest now seems a 
barren ideality. 

These turning points come too, in 
conviction, and habits and ways of 
21 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

living. Not merely does the liberal 
become the conservative; but the par- 
tisanships of earlier years mellow into 
the charitable, considerate and judicial 
opinions of middle life. The most pos- 
itive men are continually learning 
something new, veering ever so slightly 
in their views, tiring even of their own 
iterations. 

Eays of light coming through change 
of environment, through the lessons of 
sorrow, or through a variety of other 
inspiring causes lead men to give up 
the pursuit of false gods and turn 
toward purer purposes. In this pro- 
cess, the turn in life may be of a more 
or less drastic character. In the story 
of the saints we read of men giving 
their wealth to the poor and forsaking 
the world, as a means of divesting 
themselves of the clogs which held 
them to a state of life from which they 
craved freedom. They burned the 
ships of their old world behind them, 
so to speak — there could be no turning 
back. To regain bodily health men 
have given up business and broken up 
their homes ; why not similar sacrifices, 
to regain moral health, although, per- 
haps the reward is greater to win the 
22 



AS A MAN LIVES. 

battle on the ground, without retreat. 
To entrench against impending failure 
in business, men have braved the loss of 
social prestige and denied themselves 
accustomed luxuries ; why not like mor- 
tification to protect and safeguard 
character, honor and virtue? When it 
is thus reasoned we come to the "turn- 
ing point" — implying the yielding up 
of what the heart has craved or what 
pleasant association has endeared or 
passion has coveted — these less worthy 
ends of existence, going by the board, to 
reach that greater success which a good 
life, with a clearer view, makes for. 



23 



THE PHILOSOPHY OP MODERA- 
TION. 

Flying ^ wo score y ear s or three score — the 
Years, difference is very slight in the eternity 
of time — and the end is soon reached. 
Up through the golden years of youth 
there is anticipation; but the wealth 
and success and position, for which men 
labor, can be enjoyed but briefly. It 
takes thirty or forty years of frugality 
to acquire what is called "competence" ; 
and competence can be possessed only 
during the ten or twenty years when 
most of us are on the down-grade of 
life. We know all this, our attention 
is frequently called to it; but yet there 
is a zest in living. We find this a dear 
old world — no other place like it — and 
we are in no hurry to leave it. Even 
old men racked with rheumatism, 
bereft of teeth and with little in life to 
anticipate and none of its illusions 
remaining, are in no hurry to be 
through with it. They see each new 
summer sun rise and circle in its 

24 



PHILOSOPHY OF MODERATION. 

meridian with an interest as grateful 
as that of their childhood. 

That everything on earth is brief and 
transitory is no reason that life should 
be without enjoyment. That death is 
certain is no reason that we should 
stand always with the shadow of the 
tomb upon us. 

Nature assuages the hardness of this 
fate by letting us forget it; and by 
prompting us to live on and hope on 
and enjoy each day as if life were to go 
on forever. If we take life in that way 
—and the mass of humanity in greater 
or less degree do so take it — we are 
taking it at its best. 

But while we allow nature and a kind 
Providence to carry us along oblivious 
of doomsday, we shall also provide for 
our happiness by being wise enough to 
see that there is an end, and that vio- 
lent passions and over-mastering ambi- 
tions are foolish, in view of the fewness 
of our years and the burden such 
travail puts upon us. In most in- 
stances that which embitters life, is 
disappointment resulting from placing 
two much stress upon the things of this 
world, — its wealth, its successes, or the 
pursuit of its pleasures. It might be 
25 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

well if those who have thought to find 
their heaven here, and are bitterly 
disappointed, could realize the heaven 
of the hereafter; but religion holds out 
little of such hope to the voluptuary, 
the miser and the worldling. Here in 
fact are the real life failures : they who 
for the prizes of this brief life let go 
the promises of eternity. 



Wonidwe Somebody, writing in a current mag- 
8ver Lives az i ne > discusses the question : "Would 

Again? we ]^ ve our ^ veg Qver a g a i n ?» -j us t a3 

they have been, of course. And the 
writer comes to the conclusion that, 
ask the question of the majority of 
Americans, and "they would answer 'I 
pass' even when holding a full hand." 
Life and the new years coming to 
us seem pleasant because of the illu- 
sions, with which our imagination fills 
them. The sweetest pleasure, like the 
Hebrew verb, has no present tense. 
Unless we place our calculations within 
the limits of moderation and govern 
our desires by the higher motives of 
Christian philosophy, we are bound to 
be disappointed. 

26 



PHILOSOPHY OF MODERATION. 

Observe the cases of Byron and 
Goethe — two men of genius and also 
votaries of pleasure. One would sup- 
pose that the former had a pleasant 
time of it here — "a short life and a 
merry one"; yet he would admit that 
he had only two days of genuine happi- 
ness out of it. 

Goethe lived to die at eighty or more, 
and all he counted out of his years of 
breathing was eleven days of a good 
time. 



"He who has supped at the table of kings 

And yet starved in the sight of luxurious things ; 

Heard the music and yet missed the tune; who 

hath wasted 
One part of life's grand possibilities — friend, 
That man will bear with him, be sure, to the end, 
A blighted experience, a rancor within. 
You may call it a virtue— I call it a sin." 

Something It is all in the forecast, depending on 

Must Be <. •, 

Missed, whether you are the votary of pleasure 
and passion, as Owen Meredith shows 
himself in the above lines, or the ascetic 
and the wizard, as other men have been 
from choice, — following a philosophy 
expressly opposite. 

Actual achievement in any worthy 
department of human exertion seems to 
enforce a measurable self-denial of 

27 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

what are termed "the pleasures of life." 
The earnest teacher, the zealous 
preacher, the faithful jurist, the live 
editor, the successful banker or mer- 
chant, can not go and come to pleasant 
climates with the flocking of the birds, 
nor drink deep, nor turn night into day, 
nor dance attendance on beauty, nor 
shake care and responsibility. 

Plain living is a condition for high 
thinking. Devotion to one's specialty 
is a necessity if any eminence is to be 
gained in a life's work. Consecration 
to the work of God in the experience of 
the Catholic church requires the priest 
to forego domestic ties. The illustra- 
tions are numerous. The poet and 
the epicure may protest. The fact 
remains. 



a False There is a familiar fable which 

Aim. 

represents a knight in hot pursuit of a 
receding phantom. Again and again 
he stretches forth his arm to seize the 
fleeting fraud. Again and again it 
eludes him. So he spends fruitless 
years and vain endeavors grasping at 
expectation and realizing disappoint- 
ment. The fable is varied, but the 



PHILOSOPHY OF MODERATION. 

moral remains the same, in the labor 
of Sispyhus, who rolls his great round 
stone up a moral incline only to see it 
roll down repeatedly when near the 
top; or in the hopeless task of "drop- 
ping buckets into empty wells and 
growing old in drawing nothing up." 
What, with old Kome, was ease with 
dignity — otium cum dig filiate, and 
what the modern Italians dream of as 
dolce far niente, a time of pleasant 
leisure, has been the aim in life of 
thousands of men. To get the means 
therefor, they have toiled all the day 
and troubled all the night; saying: 
"Some day wealth will buy this ease 
and comfort; some day a golden key 
will unlock the rare enjoyments of 
life." Carlyle says : 'Whoever has six- 
pence is sovereign over all men to the 
extent of that sixpence; commands 
cooks to feed him, philosophers to 
teach him, kings to mount guard over 
him — to the extent of that sixpence/ 
Let us, therefore, hoard up these very 
potent genii called sixpences. The 
more of them the better, and the 
further they will go and the more 
limitless will be their power. 



29 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

So the man is transformed into the 
machine called Gathergold. Tenny- 
son's hero in Locksley Hall utters a 
malediction upon this slavery of civil- 
ization when he curses the 

"Social wants that sin against the strength of 
youth." 

Too bad that the best time of life must 
be devoted to amassing merely that 
which will insure food and shelter to an 
old man. Youth is chained like 
Milton's Sampson, 

"At the mill with slaves 
Condemned to labor under Philistine yoke." 

But the yoke is a voluntary one. 
The youth is like the knight in the 
fable. He has elected to pursue a 
fraudulent ideal in life. His tantalus 
leads him through all kinds of labor. 
When all is over he is too old to obtain 
the substantial worth of life. 



Measure of ^ E are inclined to protest that 
Success. mone y should not be the measure of 
success in life, yet all our modern biog- 
raphers and all our modern novels, 
which are more or less expressive of the 
moral level of the time, are stamped 
with this notion of success. To say of 
30 



PHILOSOPHY OF MODERATION. 

a young man, "he is making a great 
deal of money,". is a challenge for our 
respect and esteem. "He is growing 
rich," "his practice is worth thous- 
ands," "he is doing an immense busi- 
ness," "he has gotten hold of a gold 
mine," are translated to mean that he, 
whoever he may be, is getting the true 
value out of life. 

When we come to think it over, we 
will reflect that all this money-gather- 
ing may co-exist with other conditions 
that do not promise happiness with 
wealth. One may make money and yet 
develop no character. Then the enjoy- 
ment of his wealth or the power that 
money confers belongs to somebody 
who takes or inherits from him. He 
may win wealth and lose health. He 
may pile up riches at the expense of 
his personal salvation, his truth, his 
honor. He may rise in the world, 
isolated from any genuine friendships 
or relationships. 

Let it be granted that if a man 
makes much money and yet keeps his 
health, develops his character, retains 
his friends and saves his soul, he is 
truly successful. What proportion, 
think you, of those who amass wealth 
31 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

do this? Not one-tenth, we surmise. 
An Abbott Lawrence among Boston 
merchants is produced at the rate of 
two per generation. The effort to suc- 
ceed notably and grandly, in other 
directions as well as in the money direc- 
tion, break the man down if he tries it ; 
but usually he does not try it, for his 
eagerness after money dwarfs his 
growth in character, deprives him of 
the privilege of friendship and en- 
dangers his soul. 



32 



SPIRITUAL FORCE. 

The win The will to do the right as we see it 
is spiritual force; and spiritual energy 
is the best development of what is 
called "force of character." It is a 
thing of the mind, a matter of wishing 
and striving, strongly, deeply, continu- 
ously. 

Passion is always playing across the 
purposes that our moral being puts 
forth. Men of good intention are thus 
veered from the straight course. "The 
spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" 
— which is the time-honored apology 
for want of spiritual force. 

According to the old moralists the 
utterly reprobate are those who have 
not the will to turn from their beset- 
ting sins. They may, at times, repent, 
but are never sincerely resolved to give 
up their pleasures. The intellect of 
conscience remains, but its will is dead. 

'That is the best blood which has the mo3t iron 
in't 
To edge resolve with." 

That is the true spiritual life which 
makes for the right with forceful deter- 
33 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

urination. It is so earnest in its ends 
that it calls to its aid every assistance. 
Altogether, aside from any religious 
considerations, the influence of prayer, 
mortification and the avoidance of 
temptation must be recognized in the 
growth of spiritual force. From a 
purely psychological standpoint, fer- 
vent prayer is fervent wishing for the 
good resolved upon. It is an exercise 
and a formulation of spiritual force. 
The avoidance of temptation is the 
weakening of those passions which play 
across the moral purposes. 

"Refrain to-night. 
And that shall lend a kind of easiness 
To the next abstinence; the next more easy. 
For use almost can change the stamp of nature." 

And mortification and self-denial 
still further strengthen the spiritual 
will. Thus, when the will to do right 
is strong, there is also clearer mor- 
al vision. Make-shifts, compromises, 
bribes of time and circumstance, are 
thrust aside and the man of spiritual 
force sees without hesitation that 

"If right be right, to follow right 
Were wisdom in the scorn of consequence." 



Be Just and THERE IS a strength about lUSt COn- 
Fear Not. ■ ° ■ * 

duct and the policy of justice itself that 
34 



SPIRITUAL FORCE. 

is commonly misprized. The judg- 
ment of many .men is warped into 
believing that finesse is better than 
honesty, or that expedients and tricks 
are shrewder than straightforwardness. 

If a victory is not predicated upon 
truth, it is barren, joyless and transit- 
ory. To take broad views is to look at 
matters as they transpire in the long 
run. In the long run the indirect, 
vacillating policy is rejected. In the 
long run the man of tricks and in- 
trigues is well understood by his neigh- 
bors in the community, and his influ- 
ence is discounted accordingly. 

On the other hand — for an honest, 
consistent policy, presented openly and 
above board, there is generated a proper 
esteem. If it be sound and beneficial, 
it will eventually have its way. Simil- 
arly with the man of honest methods. 
His candor is respected; his refusal to 
take short cuts and to employ doubtful 
expedients, wins him the esteem of all 
who get to know him. His personal 
influence becomes a matter of much 
weight. 

All this is argued from the stand- 
point of good policy. There is a 
higher standpoint, if we discuss the 
35 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

question in the light of a man's duty 
to himself. What cause is so sacred 
that a man must lie for it? What 
gain is so great that one must warp 
his nature into that of a hypocrite in 
order to win it? Character is more 
important than great wealth; it is a 
poor exchange, for a man wilfully to 
transform himself into an habitual liar, 
a moral coward and a penurious epi- 
cure, in order to amass property. 

Eather be just and fear not. Con- 
duct regulated on that principle will 
not prevent prosperity. It will not 
destroy influence or esteem. It will, on 
the contrary, merit the approval of one's 
own conscience. 

"And more true joy Marcellus exiled feels, 
Than Caesar with a Senate at his heels." 

But Caesar is extinguished more fre- 
quently than Marcellus is exiled. 

The business man who is the soul of 
commercial honor, the incorruptible 
servant, the guileless clergyman and the 
mechanic, whose soul, through every 
vicissitude of fortune is still his own, 
are the types in demand. Whatever 
place they occupy — high or low — they 
are the models called for. 

u Tall men, sun crowned, 
Who live above the mob 
In public duty and in private thinking." 

36 



SPIRITUAL FORCE. 

<be Kernel Carefully study the influences of 

f Progress. J 

historical epochs,, and the lesson they 
always teach in that progress has been 
the result of conviction. This is Emer- 
son^s meaning when he says that every 
revolution, however great, is at first a 
thought in the mind of a single man. 

Peter, the Hermit, was possessed by 
the conviction that Christians should 
rescue the Holy Land from infidel 
rapacity. Other pilgrims had probably 
conceived the notion before the Hermit 
was born, but he alone let it sink into 
the depths of a purpose. How he 
became forthwith an incendiary of 
men's minds, and how from his impulse 
all Europe kept throwing itself against 
Asia for a period of two hundred years, 
is testimony in point, furnished by 
history. 

The preacher of the Crusades may to 
one view seem a fanatic, but to all views 
his influence resulted in a stride for- 
ward for civilization. This is the 
inscrutable providence that rewards con- 
viction. Commerce awoke, new lights 
shone, great discoveries were made, and 
when men reflected whence came this 
varied and simultaneous advance and 
progress, and whence dated the new 
37 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

spirit that animated it all, reference 
was at once made back to a preaching 
frair, traveling over the hills and val- 
leys of Europe, uttering a conviction. 
There was the beginning, there was the 
man, and there was the thought that 
set the mass of men and events in 
motion. 

These are the epochs we most like to 
dwell upon, because they present man- 
kind, not as the play-thing of blind 
forces, but as an intelligence possessing 
moral purpose and free will. The per- 
vasive growth of the anti-slavery move- 
ment in America is quite as creditable 
to this people as anything else in its 
history. At first the contention of a 
few earnest men whose petition to Con- 
gressman John Quincy Adams, ex-pres- 
ident though he was, jeopardized his 
political existence in presenting; their 
meetings were mobbed; their news- 
papers suppressed and themselves cov- 
ered with ignominy and disgrace; yet 
by sheer force of truth and argument 
they found their way to the conscience 
of the country until they elected a pres- 
ident, who said : "This nation can not 
go on existing half-free and half -slave." 
And when the opportunity came, Abra- 

38 



SPIRITUAL FORCE. 

ham Lincoln gave the blow which top- 
pled over the slavery superstructure 
forever. This was a triumph of princi- 
ple from which, undoubtedly, has 
ensued great industrial as well as great 
moral good. No mere selfishness, how- 
ever, could have induced the Garrisons 
and the Phillips to labor as they did in 
the face of an angry public. Selfish- 
ness would squat itself prone with 
existing institutions. There would be 
stagnation and inertia except for the 
saving presence of a moral life in the 
people, which breeds honest conviction 
and impels a manly assertion of what 
truth the conscience has to utter. 



39 



THE COUKAGE OP CONVICTION. 

Living The exigencies of modern times are 
Present. suc ] 1 ^hat men who wish to lead in 
thought can not sit on their opinions, or 
call in a jury of the vicinage to discuss 
mere proprieties. The wires are wait- 
ing and the press is ready for its food. 
Out with your opinion or your convic- 
tion while it is fresh and timely and 
while it has its use and its mission. 

Men who are cravenly afraid of their 
own shadows neither cultivate their own 
respect nor the respect of others. They 
wait to see which way the cat jumps 
while braver men are prodding the 
feline in the right direction. Then, 
they are "ever strong upon the stronger 
side." It is a matter of fact, however, 
that such timorous souls make more 
mistakes of policy than even the out- 
spoken, fearless man, who lets honest 
conviction be his sole guide and 
philosopher. 

"Let any man once show the world that he feels 
Afraid of its bark, and 'twill fly at his heels : 
Let him fearlessly face it, 'twin leave him alone; 
But 'twill fawn at his feet if he fling it a bone." 

£0 



COURAGE OF CONVICTION. 

Of course there are occasions when 
second sober thought will modify the 
asperity of opinions and suggest the 
wisdom of silence. But woe to the man- 
liness of him who suppresses himself 
too often or too habitually. Attrition 
with the world of men and thought will 
eventually cultivate a power of self- 
discernment ; and one will know wheth- 
er the conviction that comes to him is a 
matter of impulse or a matter of 
principle. 



Rieht In democracies, strong men must. 

Rather -, . , , i i i 

Than g now and again, refuse to bow to tempor- 



Popularity. 



ary waves of popular sentiment. They 
must feel with Coriolanus in Shake- 
speare's play: 

"For the mutable, rank-scented many, let them 
Regard me, as I do not flatter, and 
Therein behold themselves." 

In politics, a kind of leadership which 
has no other policy than going with the 
tide, cannot last because it cannot be 
consistent. Next year the people may 
go altogether contrary to the course 
they have endorsed this year. The 
majority pardons this fickleness in 
itself, but it won't pardon it in a man 
who claims to possess the capacity of 
41 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

leadership. And the public is not slow 
to see a demonstration of moral courage 
in the action of a man who dares at 
times to be on the unpopular side. 



Op^nions! )le,, ^ smooth path to prosperity is not 
the seeking of the best minds or the best 
men. This is particularly true as 
respects those who preach and teach and 
lead the community. What Horace 
Greeley says in one of his private letters 
is full of wholesome, good sense : 

"No man knows better than I do that 
all the kingdoms of this world are to 
be acquired by just the opposite course 
from that I have chosen to pursue — by 
cottoning to whatever is established and 
popular, and warring upon novelties 
and innovations. I think I understand 
the philosophy of success as well as you 
do, and see why it is that 'the Son of 
Man had nowhere to lay His head* in 
an age and country which honored 
Herod, Pilate and Tiberius Caesar. 
But I think I see that there is some- 
thing better worth living for than tem- 
poral power, popularity and riches — 
that God's truth is still to be sought 
among the lowly, the despised, and the 
42 



COURAGE OF CONVICTION. 

outcast, and that whoso will serve God 
and bless man must be esteemed exactly 
as men of your stamp regarded Jesus of 
Nazareth eighteen centuries ago, name- 
ly, as a young man of rare abilities, high 
courage, and blameless life, who might 
do vast good if he would only abandon 
his radical notions and low associations, 
and conform to the orthodox creeds and 
conservative instincts of his time. To 
me the stable and the manger that shel- 
tered the infant Saviour are not dead, 
isolated records of what has been, but 
the symbols of a truth that is vital and 
impressive to-day." 

The judgment of those who walk with 
silk stockings on velvet carpets, who 
live in a light toned and softened by the 
arts of civilization and who breathe only 
the intellectual perfume of the boudoir, 
is not the thing for us to square our- 
selves with. When we cause it to fret 
and exclaim, to hem and to haw at our 
ungraciousness, to talk of "fanaticism" 
and "imprudence," we have indications 
of a negative character that we are 
approximating what is right and just, 
along the line of truth and courage, and 
that we must not turn back or deflect. 
The respectable and comfortable classes 
43 



OUTLOOKS ANE INSIGHTS. 

in a republic like ours do not cherish the 
summum bonum of social and political 
development. They are what they are, 
largely per force of the ascendancy of 
their interests in the industries and 
legislation of the country. The real 
reformers may come, as they came in the 
time of Christ, from the fishermen of 
the nation — the lower stratum, not the 
higher; or from those who speak from 
and in behalf of these masses and keep 
in touch with them. 



Couriers. A GREA T writer has said that the 
truest patriots must always die as 
traitors — condemned by the unjust 
judgment of their times. We imagine 
that the age is becoming juster and 
more liberal to those who tell it unpleas- 
ant truths and herald radical ideas. 
Garrison and Phillips were frequently 
threatened by the "broad-cloth mobs" of 
Boston, but they lived to witness the 
success of the abolition movement. 
They died with the honors of liberators 
and not with the ignominy of traitors. 
There are hundreds of men whose 
moral vision is clear enough, but who 
lack the stamina to declare themselves. 
44 



COURAGE OF CONVICTION. 

The task of the avant courier for a new 
movement or a pressing reform, is 
usually to supply courage as well as 
conviction. The movement frequently 
has to wait for the right crop of men as 
well as for the ripe opportunity. 

Some of the conditions of modern 
society are decidedly adverse to the 
avant courier and his contention. We 
have a dull juste milieu of namby 
pamby compromises. To set one's face 
against the conformity required in the 
commercial, the political and the social 
world about us, requires a rarer courage 
than that which braved religious perse- 
cution in the past. 

If one reads history with no other 
bias than a desire for truth, he is apt 
to reach the conclusion that conser- 
vatism has done more injury to man- 
kind than even the wildest attempts at 
innovation and the crankiest of avant 
couriers. Courts have greater sins to 
answer for than revolutions, and some 
law-makers than some law-breakers. 
The conservative malevolence of Burke 
toward the French revolution is an illus- 
tration of the mistake of a standpoint. 
The results of that revolution outweigh 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

a hundred political philosophies like 
that of the great Irish publicist. 



Once to every man and nation 

Comes the moment to decide. 
In the strife of truth and falsehood, 

For the good or evil side. 
Then it is the brave man chooses, 

And the coward stands aside 
Doubting in his abject spirit, 

Till his Lord is crucified.— Lowell. 

Br e v m There is a choosing of this kind that 

Chooses, is not so heroic. It transpires almost 

every day. Silence is golden then, in 

the sense that it is convertible into 

bankable funds. 

Not once — but oftentimes, in every- 
one's life there are moments to show 
your colors. The constitutional coward 
has a crabbed habit of shielding his own 
miserable timidity by talking of the 
"rashness" and temerity of braver men. 
O'Connell was dubbed "a very rash 
young man" by the older heads, when he 
was leading the van for Catholic eman- 
cipation. "Unwise expressions" — "in- 
cendiary speeches" — these are the stock 
phrases of men who are always waiting 
and fanning themselves, but out of 
whom the world or Truth never gets an 
atom of good. There has never been 

46 



COURAGE OF CONVICTION, 

an assertion of great principles or of 
salutary truths, f ram the Sermon on the 
Mount to Magna Charta, from Magna 
Charta to the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, and from the Declaration of 
Independence to the Proclamation of 
Emancipation, that has not seemed 
"unwisely rash" to — cowards. 



47 



NOW IS THE APPOINTED TIME. 

Get into One of the new lessons that the first 

Action. 

Napoleon added to the science of war 
was taught the Austrians in Italy. He 
showed them that they were too slow in 
coming into action. While they were 
wheeling their army about, he struck it 
in two places with the same French 
force. On the Austrian side there was 
lubberliness and procrastination ; on the 
French side, energy, dispatch, celerity. 

In a great fortification there is a big 
gun which, if loaded and properly 
pointed, will carry annihilation to any 
assaulting party. But when the fortifi- 
cation is actually assailed by an attack- 
ing party, those who man the walls find 
it necessary to overhaul the big gun, to 
readjust its position, to hunt about for 
its ammunition. The result is that the 
attacking party is upon the fortifica- 
tion before the big gun has come into 
action. 

Now there are hundreds of men and 
women, both in the little and the big 
affairs of life, who are too slow in 
48 



THE APPOINTED TIME. 

coming into action. They acquire an 
education, but fail to use it soon enough. 
They acquire wealth, but fail to enjoy 
it. They postpone the larger things of 
life with a sort of dilettant dilatoriness. 
They are like the people who are said to 
have an ambition to get into good 
society in Philadelphia : "it takes a life- 
time to get in, and you get in only when 
you are ready to die/' So these people 
realize that it is time to begin to live, 
only when they are about ready to die. 
They are "old men in a hurry" ; rushing 
to catch the last train at the eleventh 
hour of their lives. And what is the 
matter? They are too slow in coming 
into action. 



•To-morrow Many men see things as they are, and 
to-morrow conceive things as they ought to be. 
to-morrow" But instead of action there is debate, 
indecision, temporizing, procrastinat- 
ing, indolence and vacillation. Some 
wait for time which "heals all things." 
Some drift. Some console themselves 
with the thought that they must live in 
the world as they find it, and not as 
they would wish it to be. 

We are not disparaging the grain of 
49 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

practical philosophy to be found in 
each and all of these views. But a 
great deal remains undone, unchanged, 
unreformed, impenitent, bad, miserable 
and hell-bent, on account of this 
disposition. 

With some, life is wasted in a vain 
forecast of 

"To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow." 

They put off achievements by which 
posterity might know them ; worse than 
this, they put off virtuous living by 
which they might gain eternity. Their 
last to-morrow is an hour before death. 
And Lorenzo Dow has defined death- 
bed repentence to be burning out the 
candle of life in the service of the devil, 
and burning the snuff in the face of 
Heaven. 



Power is General Sherman found much wis- 
dom in this passage which he quoted in 
an address delivered to the graduating 
class of a college in Michigan: "Of 
course knowledge is power, we all know 
that ; but mere knowledge is not power ; 
it is simply possibility. Action is 
power, and its highest manifestation is 
action with knowledge." 
50 



THE APPOINTED TIME. 

There must be action as we go along 
the pathway of life, if there is to be 
any power, or force, or mark in the 
career we are making. If one has 
convictions, let there be no time serving ; 
now is the appointed time for their 
expression. 

If a thing is right, the sooner it is 
done, the better. Whatever justice is 
due to me, I want it now. If there is 
anything good for me I must go directly 
and get it. If something needs reform, 
the speedier and more drastic the 
remedy, the better. If anything must 
be said, any understanding be had, any 
overhanging fate encountered, any 
change important, let these proper 
things begin forthwith. 

If there is a good deed to be done, if 
there is a noble aim to be realized, if 
there are duties awaiting us in our daily 
lives, the time for all that is now before 
sunset. 

"The flighty purpose ne'er is overtook 
Unless the deed go with it ; from this moment 
The very firstlings of my heart 
Shall be the firstlings of my hand." 



51 



THE SOCIETY OP THE ENER- 
GETIC. 

Daring "The society of the energetic class," 
' Emerson tells us, "is full of courage, of 
attempts which intimidate the pale 
scholar." Animal spirits, daring and 
robust energy, are absolute requirements 
for him who would make his way in the 
world. The bruiser succeeds often 
when the scholar fails; all because he 
has the sanguine grit, the elbow power 
and push, depth of lung and swagger- 
ing presence that command success. 

Success is accidental with the timid. 
But the bold carry the citadel of fortune 
by sudden surprises. Timid people 
pause upon the Eubicon of great 
possibilities ; the brave cast the die and 
cross over. "You have greatly ventured, 
but all must do so who would grandly 
win." 

The five great qualities of a good 
commander, foresight, skill in the use 
of resources, decision, dispatch and en- 
ergy, are the qualities demanded, more 
52 



SOCIETY OF THE ENEEGETIC. 

or less, of the good farmer and the good 
business man also. 



^e. Men drift and dawdle, "tread the 

Discipline 7 

of Mind, primrose path of dalliance," and so, 
halve the effectiveness and results of 
their lives. They do not talk to the 
point, but around it. They do not 
strike opportunities, but observe them. 
They diagnose evils and impediments, 
but they fail to take heroic measures. 
Tone and gesture indicate the habits of 
men in this respect. There is the ring- 
ing voice and the firm tread. Or the 
man ambles and shambles as he hems 
and haws. 

The whole difference is due to self- 
culture. Colleges may, as Ingersoll 
says, "polish brickbats and dull dia- 
monds." Station and opportunity may 
give us a thing and not a man. But 
the clear-cut character comes from 
sterling stuff within, working its will 
outwardly and forming the man accord- 
ing to an ideal that is bred in the bone 
and tingling in the nerves. 

It is ever true in this matter that as 
a man sows so shall he reap. Let his 
mental habits encourage desultory 
53 



OUTLOOKS AND INSTGHTS. 

thinking, and he dissipates his strength 
to perceive, reason and decide with pre- 
cision. In trade and in the forum he 
will not know what he wants, and 
other men, keen-visioned for the main 
chance, will lead him. 

Asleep to what is waking and 
stirring about him, he will lose his 
grip. Failing to cultivate all the activi- 
ties by whose harmonious exercise the 
man of the world is brought into being, 
he will perpetually tread upon ground 
where he is unpracticed and unstrung. 

The ever ready and ever decisive are 
neither shallow nor superficial, but 
self-cultured and self-controlled. They 
have submitted to discipline and auster- 
ity, where others have lived to no pur- 
pose. 

"Self-knowledge, self-reverence, self-control, 
These three alone lead on to sovereign power." 



As a rule, men strongly attached to 
causes and principles are apt to be im- 
patient of events. Affairs move too 
slowly towards the consummation 
which they desire. Saws like "Rome 
was not built in a day," serve merely to 
irritate them. 

54 



SOCIETY OF THE ENEBGETIC. 

Men of clear perception, however, 
may be strong partisans without being 
impatient. Their prescience calms 
their passions. They possess them- 
selves thoroughly of the facts of the 
situation. Their vision sweeps the 
field. They are skilled in the arithme- 
tic of forces. They put events together 
and see the conclusion in advance, just 
as the school boy grasps the inevitable 
circumstance of two and two making 
four. 

When there is a great fact in history 
like a French Kevolution, the careful 
historian, studying backward for the 
causes, marshals all the great tenden- 
cies that went directly to the making of 
the event. They are so clearly pictured 
forth, coming like giants with irresist- 
ible tread from the cavern of past years, 
that the reader may wonder why they 
were not discerned in their day — that 
they were not of public notoriety. Yet 
even the Cassandras of the time — who 
undoubtedly did prophecy what subse- 
quently happened — had little faith in 
their own forebodings; they saw dimly 
what might occur if the world did not 
heed their homilies. 

The culture of history and the train- 
55 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

ing of affairs, social and political, com- 
bine to give men greater confidence in 
systems and tendencies than in isolated 
events and impulsive efforts. 



Opportune ^ EN °^ c * ear perception, who feel 
Moment. ^ a ^ their gift implies some moral obli- 
gation, may use it in many excellent 
ways. If wrong crushes over the field 
like a Juggernaut avalanche, these men 
know enough to stand out of the way 
and to husband their strength for the 
reaction, while evil is running its 
course. Or they may see the right mo- 
ment of opportunity for sounding the 
alarm bell of a counter movement. 

These opportune moments are the 
occasions for that exercise of clear 
vision, good judgment and steady nerve 
that give individuals their great use in 
history. When a thing is to be done, 
"he who dallies is a dastard, and he who 
doubts is damned." Makeshifts, 
patehed-up truces are worse than use- 
less. 

Men who know what they want 
usually achieve something. Those who 
drift with the tide, shift with the wind, 
56 



sojfEry op raa essaasrto. 

and take leaps in the dark, are the crea- 
tures, not the creators, of events. 

Knowing what they want, knowing 
their resources, men of will and pur- 
pose have the decision, dispatch and 
energy that result in Acts. They are 
ready to take heroic measures. 

What if they do cut through conven- 
tionalities? What if they overturn re- 
spectable Dignities and mild Peace- 
makers? The thing has to be done. 
The lance has to be applied. It is radi- 
calism, but it is Cure. They burn their 
ships behind them, but there is an end 
to paltering counsels and temporizing 
methods. - 

Irresolution toys with opportunity. 
The loud demagogue vaunts it over 
subdued benches ; the teachings of time- 
honored Bigotry and undisputed preju- 
dices are proclaimed with haughty in- 
tolerance. Why shuffle and cower? 
Why not bell the cat? 

Tallien hit the nail on the head when 
he defied Eobespiere in the tribune, 
thus ending the Eeign of Terror. 
O'Connell knew that he was precipitat- 
ing the crisis of years when he decided 
to stand at the Clare election. He 
breathed a stranger courage into his 
57 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

millions of down-trodden, submissive 
countrymen. Up to his time they had 
been the abused and the villified. The 
pettiest magistrate claimed his title 
and his obeisance. Majesty and office 
expected them to cringe in the dust. 
O'Connell hurled epithets at majesty 
and office together, and gave the villi- 
penders of his race liberal measure of 
their own abuse in return. How like 
an electric thrill this boldness raised the 
spirit of a hunted race, let History 
speak ! 

The bloody Parisian mob, which 
made all the excess of the French Revo- 
lution possible, sought to renew the 
Reign of Terror, in Vandemaire, year 
four of the Revolutionary calendar. 
The mob, forty thousand strong, 
swarmed through all the streets of 
Paris towards the Convention Hall. It 
was the old plan to crowd in upon the 
Legislators and compel the issuance of 
sweeping, communistic, bloodthirsty 
decrees. This time the Convention em- 
ployed a young artillery officer to de- 
fend it. His decisive preparatory 
moves settled the fate of the contest. 
He at once took the measures required 
by the situation; none but he, however, 
58 



SOCIETY OF THE ENERGETIC. 

would have discerned with such swift 
intuition what was proper to the occa- 
sion. He ordered arms stored in one 
locality; posted guns in another street; 
threw up a barricade in a district that 
seemingly had no relation to the dan- 
ger; stationed a reserve guard at an 
obscure church door, and so admirable 
was his provision that, when the 
Parisian mob appears in thousands for 
the onslaught, there is a whiff of grape- 
shot — "a very storm of shrieking cold 
lead." The mob scatters; the French 
Eevolution is brought to a close, and the 
Age of Napoleon is born. 



59 



SUAVITER IN MODO. 

Serenity. t he Spaniards have a proverb : "We 
will all be bald in a hundred years/' 
intended, no doubt, to calm the nerves. 
For what are present losses and annoy- 
ances in the face of ultimate baldness? 
Why should we vex ourselves with petty 
disappointments ; unnerve ourselves 
with the daily mishaps of business; 
grow sensitive over fancied slights; be 
consumed with jealousy or envy; 
hoard money; bother about influence, 
power or popularity ? — a hundred years 
will see us stripped of everything, — 
even of our hair. 

It was the happy conceit of an Eng- 
lish writer to speak of a "tempest in a 
teapot." Tempests of this nature are 
only too common in the lives of every- 
body. Men fume and fret over matters 
of no consequence whatever. Half the 
nervous waste of the uproar would 
mend the mishap. The stew and sput- 
ter of yesterday will seem unaccount- 
able to the calm reflection of to- 
morrow. 

60 



SUAVITER IN MODO. 

The habit induces its own excess. 
There is trouble^ enough as we go along 
in life without borrowing any. Yet 
some self -persecuted people are in per- 
petual bustle and furore; never con- 
tent; always wanting more; grasping 
and covetous. Eiches bring neither 
ease nor solace. They go on, making 
mountains out of mole-hills, and cross- 
ing bridges before they get to them. 

The truth of the Spanish proverb 
will reach such persons in a much 
shorter time than a hundred years. "It 
is fret and worry and impatience and 
spasmodic fits of passion and anger 
which curtail our existence," says Dr. 
Hall. The poor live shorter lives than 
the rich, chiefly because the struggle 
for existence is harder with them. In 
France the average life of the wealthy 
man is twelve years longer than that of 
the laboring class. 

Time cures everything. The lapse of 
hours and days smooths over the worst 
troubles. Griefs, seemingly the most 
poignant, are assuaged. Losses, the 
most irretrievable, are made up. Gulfs 
of estrangement are filled in. In the 
perspective of the past, trials furrowed 
on the memory lose all their magnitude. 
61 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

"Blessed are the meek," it is said. 
And this is a benison upon serenity. 
The passionate, emotional and irritable 
are afflicted with the worst punish- 
ments. They cross their own purposes ; 
dash every cup of genuine pleasure ; cut 
the thread of their own lives, and live 
sweet in the memory of nobody. But 
the meek get to possess the land. The 
good things of life seem to be kept in 
store for them. Fortune likes the com- 
pany of serenity. Keligion, in depre- 
cating worldliness, ought to have the 
effect of inclining its votaries to take 
things easy. "Be not solicitous con- 
cerning the affairs of this life." There 
is a system of compensation — an un- 
varying balance of good and evil. 
"No pain without its gain." Coolness 
and serenity ever enhance the pleasure 
and profit of living. 



Morbid One does not have to follow alto- 
gether the lines of thought of Mauds- 
ley, respecting the influence of Body 
on Mind, to be persuaded that our 
moods and dispositions are largely de- 
termined by such matters as our diges- 
62 



SUAVITER IN MODO. 

tion and our physical condition gener- 
ally. 

We have our morbid periods — when 
life seems dull and wholly uninterest- 
ing or blank of any enjoyable prospect. 
If we are prone to analysis, we separate 
its complex structure into component 
parts and ponder on the tawdry things 
for which we seem to be living — wealth 
and its creature comforts, friendships 
that pass, and fame that blends into 
the forgotten. 

Now, in this frame of mind, the 
right thing is to medicate the body. Get 
out into the bracing atmosphere of a 
winter's day. Try the experiment of 
vigorous work. Walk away with brood- 
ing. Give wearied nature the soothing 
treatment of a long sleep. 

In these morbid states some people 
say ill-tempered things, or write bad 
prose and worse poetry, or come to un- 
wise decisions. Play not on the guitar 
when the instrument is out of tune. 



The "The meek shall possess the land." 

Impolicy 

of ' That is the Biblical teaching. But the 

Quarrels. . . ° 

contentious waste their energy m bitter 

words and angry feelings. Half the 

63 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

quarrels of life are avoidable. No man, 
looking back over the years, after the 
acrimony of some quarrel is allayed by 
time, but will admit to himself that it 
could have wisely been different. 

Let us not deride the politicians in 
this respect. They nurse the good will 
of their neighbors. If there is a chance 
for collision with somebody they get 
around it or give "the soft word that 
turneth away wrath/' It is always 
good politics and sometimes good 
Christianity to do as they do. 

Every man has some merits. No 
man is wholly bad. Why should we 
nourish a feud with our fellow crea- 
tures, who are not much worse than are 
we ourselves, and who are perhaps no 
more to blame (for it takes two to 
make a quarrel). What principle is 
at stake, or is served, by two-thirds of 
the neighborhood clashes that gossips 
roll over their tongues? Analyze them 
and what do they disclose except the 
weakness of the contestants, their child- 
ish anger, or jealousy or envy, their 
choleric, stomachic or alcoholic folly, 
their want of fully developed, deep- 
seated, keen-witted manliness, their in- 
ability to be philosophic enough to rise 
61 



StUVITER IK MODO 

above the pettiness and playthings of 
life. 

Some of us pride ourselves upon 
coming of a fighting race. We take 
conceit in our high spiritedness, our 
ready gift of profane defiance, our 
spunk and our impetuosity. Bah ! It 
is the courage of Falstaff, the temper 
of the braggart. It is the cool, patient, 
forbearing man in the long run who has 
the most courage and the most princi- 
ple. Your fighting race is good only 
for its paid mercenaries, led by other 
and cooler races. Your quarreling, 
choleric, world-defying fellow accumu- 
lates no results and wins no victories. 

\rt e of Looking at the world through col- 

Persuasion. ore( j glasses will not change the reality 
of things. To hold definite views is 
some evidence of a healthy and vigorous 
mind. But to hold antipathies and 
prejudices which ignore facts, is no bet- 
ter than to be altogether un-ideaed; 
and sometimes it is worse. 

The glow of passion only adds force 
to one's views where there is the back- 
ing of a peculiarly strong, well-in- 
formed and logical mind. Many men 
lose their power to make converts the 
e5 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

moment that their feelings are inter- 
ested. They can talk better on the 
side opposed to their own convictions. 
There is a suggestion of this in the 
legal saying, that whoever acts as his 
own lawyer has a fool for a client. 

It is advisable, in arguing your views, 
to dispense altogether with the motives 
of a partisan and have no wish what- 
ever to persuade. "Gentlemen, these 
are the sad facts — see them or don't 
see them, but I will try to make them 
as clear as I can to you." Benjamin 
Franklin, whatever his shortcomings, 
must be conceded to have been a worldly 
wise man; and one of the first lessons 
he learned, in his attrition with men, 
was to state his views without heat or 
dogmatism. He "conceived" that such 
was or might be the case, or such was his 
"notion" or understanding. He pleased 
rather than antagonized, and, neverthe- 
less, contrived to state his arguments 
as persuasively as any logic buffer. 

We have altogether too much recrim- 
ination in place of evidence, and too 
much swash buckler, fish woman, jury- 
lawyer, penny-a-liner rhetoric, in lieu of 
gentlemanly common sense, spoken or 
written for an unbiased public. 
66 



THE POINT OF VIEW. 

Poot't Eye When Eobert Burns was plowing in 
the fields and uprooted a daisy, he 
stopped, and, full of tender sentiment, 
wrote a poem to the little flower. The 
ordinary plowboy would have gone on, 
without a single higher thought, in his 
drudgery. 

Oh, for the eye and the heart of a 
poet in the lives we are living ! Every- 
thing then has a deeper meaning, or a 
rarer beauty. The skies are bluer, the 
grass is greener, and the flowers speak a 
language that we understand. Why, 
there is all the difference in the world 
between what the poet gets out of life 
and what the dullard and grind see 
in it. 

Now the poetic insight is not limited 
to those who write verses, for there are 
peasants who know not letters nor 
books, but who, looking out upon the 
beauties and sublimities of their moun- 
tains and valleys, have hearts filled with 
poetic fervor; and there is often a rude 
poetry in their spoken thoughts. Those 
67 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

who have no poetry in their souls, 
though they revel in wealth, are poorer 
than the peasants of Tyrol or Conne- 
mara; poorer in capacity of enjoy- 
ment. 

There is another important sense, 
besides the poetic insight, that some 
men seem born without, or else it is 
lost by non-use, or stunted by the nox- 
ious growth of materialism and ani- 
malism. This other lost sense may be 
called the instinct of faith, or spirit- 
uality — the soul and the heart of one's 
nature. In the degree that a man's 
spirituality is developed so that his per- 
spective reaches beyond this life, his 
heart losing none of the humanizing 
influences of the world and his years 
ripening and mellowing his sympathies, 
he is living a larger, a broader and a 
fuller life. If some other plowboy, 
working side by side with Burns on his 
Highland farm, had jeered at the poet 
when he picked up the daisy and made 
it the subject of a pathetic poem, it 
would hardly be fashionable for us to 
consider the plowboy the better man of 
the world. So when some over-fed 
physician, or mummified specialist, the 
major part of whose nature lies crushed 
68 



THE POINT OF VIEW. 

under his materialistic pursuits, fails to 
appreciate the message of the great 
preacher, or the spiritual life and 
insight that actuates Christian men and 
women, there should, similarly, be little 
question of the attitude of liberally 
educated men. Those who lack the 
spiritual sense are as deficient as those 
who lack the poetic sense. 



Habit of ^° cultivate a habit of always seeing 
Satire, ^he awkward or ridiculous aspect of 
things is unwise. Cynical remarks can 
be passed respecting all men and all 
happenings. Life is nothing but dregs 
and lees to one who educates himself 
out of the possibility of admiring, 
praising or wondering. It is a mourn- 
ful routine with the man whose blood 
does not sometimes boil with honest 
indignation. If the habitual sneer is 
not occasionally chased away by a 
square smile or a broad grin, then life 
is sad, indeed. If you are settled down 
in a rut of insipid bitterness, with no 
vision of the good, the true or the beau- 
tiful, it is time to travel. Go to the 
world's cataract at Niagara and see if 
your eye will not brighten at the 
69 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

stupendous master stroke of nature 
there exhibited. Stand in the presence 
of heroism and test whether your jaded 
nerves will not thrill and tingle with 
admiration. Visit the great gala occa- 
sions of nations when all that is grand 
and imposing in the resources of power, 
wealth and splendor is displayed, and 
try if you cannot observe and wonder. 

The habitual satirist tears down, but 
never builds up. He spins no meshes 
of thought which bind facts into a 
fabric of useful and helpful experience. 
His words are disparagement, chill and 
discouragement. Effort palls, hopes 
die and purposes wane under the 
jaundiced notice that he takes. 

Say a good word. Utter a timely 
suggestion. Bestow praise where it 
will bias to the right. Cheer honest 
effort. Overlook the flaws, and let the 
main aspect alone attract your atten- 
tion. Then the path of your influence 
will be marked by certain results; 
where, with the habit of satire, your 
path would be strewn with wrecks and 
abandoned efforts, begun in faith and 
deserted in cynicism. 



70 



THE POINT OF VIEW. 

shapes of The lawyer in the Scriptural tale, 
who asked the. Son of God what he 
must do to be saved, was substantially 
informed that by loving God and his 
neighbor he might thereby keep all the 
commandments. This method of sum- 
marizing the virtues in one broad act of 
charity cannot be safely pursued with 
reference to the vices. There are, 
according to the moralists, seven deadly 
sins — all bad and all distinct ; and they 
have existed in their individualities 
from the beginning, working them- 
serves out in various malignant origin- 
alities of their own. 

It does happen that some of the vices 
are more dangerous to special persons 
and classes of persons than to others. 
Lust may be the predominant fault of 
one nationality, while avarice is that of 
another. And certain vocations may 
be more exposed to one kind of trans- 
gression than to another. Or, because 
of the voluntary practice of some 
exalted virtue, like chastity or obedi- 
ence, the opposite vice may become the 
chief of the sins to struggle against. 

As an obvious consequence, one's 
state of life has a good deal to do with 
the way in which he views the vices. 
71 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

A clergyman speaking at an impressive 
convent ceremony where some young 
ladies had taken the veil, said : 

"TTnchastity is the great sin— -I may 
say, the only sin. An unchaste man 
is the most horrid object the pure stars 
look down on. Without chastity, 
domestic life, social relations, and 
peace on earth are impossible. Turn 
lechery loose upon the world and a 
devouring flame of hell will roll over 
the world, leaving only blackness and 
death behind." 

To the view of those who have 
adopted the religious state of life this 
undoubtedly is no exaggeration. And 
to any vocation, whether worldly or 
unworldly, unchastity cannot be de- 
picted in colors too abhorrent or 
revolting. 

Yet there are others of the vices which 
to the great majority of mankind, are 
probably more dangerous. Even as 
respects the religious state, the old 
legend will occur to the reader: The 
monk was given his choice to commit 
one of three sins. He chose drunk- 
enness as the least abhorrent. He 
became intoxicated and committed the 
other two sins. 

72 



THE POINT OF VIEW. 

The story is probably one of those 
moral fables which spring from a 
capacity for vivid illustrations, but who 
cannot discern its "truth to life"? 
What Herbert Spencer calls the "theol- 
ogical bias" in the intellectual life, may, 
also, have some existence in moral 
matters. The monk, probably, showed 
in his exhortations that he thought 
gluttony less of a deadly sin than he 
deemed unchastity. It was the cult 
and bias of his high and unworldly 
vocation, and nothing more. 



Not Ail The Duchess of Argyle wrote to 

One Way. GJ 

Charles Sumner: "'Do you remember 
that you never can be engaged in a 
cause again where right and wrong 
stand face to face as they did in the 
anti-slavery fight? In most human 
struggles, they are much mixed 
together." 

Charles Sumner did not heed this 
advice. He went into the new politi- 
cal contests that followed the war as if 
they were Homeric battles — all the 
good on one side and all the evil on 
the other. The result was that he got 
out of joint with "practical politics" 
73 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

and in 1872 his own party — wherein he 
had been a great leader — was obliged 
to unhorse him. 

In theological contests, good men are 
always fighting the Devil. When they 
fall out among themselves the mode of 
warfare is not readjusted. They fight 
each other as if the devil were still in 
the contest. Probably he is; but there 
is some of him on both sides. And 
there is a modicum of good on both 
sides. 



The 

Wisdom of Often the sage counsel of those who 

of our ° 

Eiders, have lived out the essential facts of life 
seems to the quick pulsations of youth 
too narrow — too prudent — too cold. 
Men and women, grandsires and grand- 
dames, who have had all the experience 
of births, marriages and deaths, take 
habitually a safe, a conservative, a 
calculating view of the questions that 
come up in careers. 

With them there should be little ven- 
ture and no adventure. It is steady go 
— and slow. "Out of the beaten tracks 
thy fathers trod, thou shalt not depart/' 
Our elders are ever passing a vote of 
want of confidence in youth, not 
74 



THE POINT OF VIEW, 

because they disparage it, but because 
of their kindness for it. The babe 
needs protection. Xo matter how man- 
like her son may grow, his mother never 
feels he can bear what his father has 
borne. Those of our elders who have 
gone through a life of hardship and 
arrived at some comfort in their old 
age, are inclined to make the question 
of bread and butter and shelter an 
unduly large consideration in life. 

Observe how it operates in their 
views of marriage. The novels and 
plays for centuries are based on collis- 
ions between the prudence of her 
father and the romance of his daughter. 
Men have been selecting their wives for 
generations, more upon the color of the 
hair, the light of an eye or the round- 
ness of a dimple, than upon the 
question of dowry. 

After all, is the wisdom of our elders 
so very wise, that the world has been 
diluting it so much in actual life 
with the illusions, romances and 
impulses of youth ? Possibly we might 
all be better; but, possibly, too, we 
should grow sadder as we grew wiser. 



75 



PERSPECTIVES. 

Guag^ w " ^ HE councils of state have always 
state S men, been troubled by the political old fogy 
—narrow viewed and narrow guaged — 
with his exaggerated fear of "entang- 
ling alliances/' his parsimony of 
economy and his quibbling views of the 
limitations of the constitution. 

Jefferson was a strict constructionist ; 
yet, when the time came to perform a 
brilliant act of statesmanship, he 
"'strained the constitution until it 
cracked" — (to use his own words), 
and bought Louisiana, out of which a 
dozen states have since been "carved." 
Monroe was a man of the utmost pru- 
dence, but his Monroe doctrine, put 
forth just in the nick of time, was the 
boldest blast of American Eepublican- 
ism that reactionary Europe ever heard. 
Adams, with his plea for "lighthouses 
in the sky," and Clay with his Panama 
congress, intended to knit the sister 
republics of the western hemisphere 
into a closer commercial unity, were 
leaders in a broad kind of statesman- 
76 



PERSPECTIVES. 

ship that properly characterized a 
youthful, vigorous and Titanic nation. 
Every stroke of such men, from the 
purchase of Louisiana, the acquisition 
of Florida, the conquest of Texas and 
the buying of Alaska, has paid the 
nation manifold, and to omit them 
would have been palpable and stupend- 
ous folly. 

Yet then and now and evermore like 
measures will be attacked by finical 
persons in the pose of conservative 
statesmen, whose views are as broad as 
their "district/' or whose bucolic pru- 
dence or blase indolence is offered as a 
safe and worthy spirit for the nation. 

When Blaine proposed his peace con- 
gress of the western republics, these 
owlish conservatives of the country's 
safety set up a prolonged objurgation 
against such jingoism. When there is 
further talk of acquiring Canada or of 
constructing a system of coast defences, 
the same narrow spirit is encountered. 
Not every innovation is a reform, and 
not every new prospect is either safe or 
desirable. Nevertheless, good things 
there are, and many of them, waiting the 
adoption that a great republic like this 
can give them, to return us benefits 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

manifold. But the cross-road states- 
man looms athwart them with his dis- 
tressing discretion, and the nation is 
held to the range of an intellect that 
could feel roomy in the emoluments of 
a village squire. 



Radicalism, 



All good causes need the spice of 
radicalism. Your evenly balanced, 
judicious and careful movements suffer 
from apathy and want of enthusiasm. 
Talk with spirit, argue with aggres- 
siveness, take advanced grounds and the 
crowd will come to listen. 

Perhaps they will not all agree with 
the extreme position taken. But he 
who leads must always be in advance. 
The multitude will never get but half 
way, and if the agitator stops at half- 
way compromises and "golden means" 
the multitude will not budge farther 
than a quarter the distance. 

Then, there is a contagious pleasure 
in carrying propositions to their log- 
ical terminus. The conservative stops 
with the goody goody ; the radical wants 
the whole truth, and nothing but the 
truth. 

Young men are radicals by constitu- 
78 



PERSPECTIVES. 

tion. No movement that has not in it 
something of the courage, the dash and 
the audacity of radicalism, can win 
their hearty adherance. Grant that 
they attempt too much, or, hope too ex- 
travagantly; it will be time enough for 
them to turn conservatives when they 
grow old. 

We must not be too ready to propose 
compromises before the opposing side 
arrive at a tractable spirit. And there 
is no better way to force a tractable 
disposition upon our opponents than by 
carrying our contention to its ultimate 
sequences. There is a certain unrea- 
sonableness in radicalism that makes 
the stubborn evil, which it antagonizes, 
glad to be reasonable and willing to 
treat upon any fair basis. This cir- 
cumstance is apparent in all history: 
in the granting of power to the people ; 
in the destruction of feudalism; in the 
downfall of slavery; and in the decline 
of landlordism. 



Puritanism is a social medicine — 
unpleasant to take, obnoxious as a 
steady diet, but often, when taken — 
good medicine. 

79 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

Ordinary Christian ministration does 
little or nothing to affect the social evil 
— that canker of city life that among 
Christians should not be as much as 
mentioned. Ordinary Christian min- 
istration has an apparent truce with 
saloonism — an institution, in its Amer- 
ican form, rotten to the core and 
branded with the mark of hell. 

But aroused Puritanism — especially 
masculine Puritanism — makes headway 
against these evils; and it is the only 
thing that does make headway. Why 
should we not have mobs on the side of 
morality ? The wrath of God, speak- 
ing in the voice of an aroused people, 
is the only thing under the new dispen- 
sation that will bring fear into the 
haunts of sin. If there is any better 
way to fight the devil than with fire, 
experience has not taught it. As 
toward a great evil — the money lenders 
in the temple — there were no persua- 
sive pleadings ; it was the lash and the 
scourge, summarily, right and left, 
until the evil was cleaned out. 

This is the only method with the 
evils that afHict the morality of our 
cities. We are living now under a 
truce with the devil. The intelligence, 



PERSPECTIVES. 

morality and respectability of our 
large cities, regarded as a force (and 
aside from individual exceptions) 
stand secluded from the lower stratum, 
yet not unaffected by it; for they feed 
it with fresh recruits, the punishment 
for not fighting it. 

The times are ripe for the Puritan 
to appear. Good people, we may 
shrink back from his raining of fire and 
brimstone. But do not sneer at him — 
earnestness is always respectable. We 
may live when he is buried under 
popular odium to enjoy his clean 
Sunday and to get the benefit of the 
strong moral force he has infused into 
public opinion. 



Public 011 in * N times of war, when men volunteer 
Spirit. i n defense of our common country, we 
admire their patriotism and commend 
their public spirit. 

Peace hath its duties no less import- 
ant than war. If it be meritorious to 
risk one's life to defend the nation, it 
is also meritorious to devote one's time 
and attention to elevate and improve 
the nation. 

The bravery that we all admire in the 
81 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

soldier is also manifest by the citizen 
who volunteers his aid and presence to 
all public spirited movements. 

In 1862 many Americans who had 
profited by the liberty and security 
given them by a free government, left 
the endangered Union and sheltered 
themselves in Canada until the trouble 
was all over. 

Hundreds of us are doing similarly 
mean things to-day. We see move- 
ments afoot for the betterment of our 
fellow-men and we never lend a hand. 
We miser our time and our sympathy. 
We "let others do it"; fearing that we 
will lose something if we participate, 
or that we will be mussed up in the 
jostle, or have our respectability 
impaired. 

Want of public spirit is to be looked 
upon as a defect in character — a sort of 
deficiency in capacity for friendship 
and sympathy. 

We all owe something to our com- 
munity and in paying such indebted- 
ness we earn for ourselves a rounder 
life and a fuller citizenship. These 
duties to the community may be differ- 
ent for different individuals. One may 
hold office, another may found an art 
82 



PERSPECTIVES. 

gallery, still another may visit the sick. 

But no man. should be without some 
method of exercising his public spirit. 
He will find his duty not far away and 
it may be simple and unostentatious. 

Now and then a young man sighs for 
the pomp and circumstance of war, that 
he may show his heroism. He would 
carry his country's flag in the face of 
the foe and plant it on the ramparts of 
rebellion. But in the life about him 
he is too apathetic to attend a caucus 
or assist in some parish good work. 
Have we here the makings of a hero or 
of a braggart? A man who requires 
the exceptional circumstance of war to 
show his public spirit is too luxurious 
a subject for the modern state. These 
are times when the arts of peace are 
most useful; and a citizenship which 
has its fruition in the good works of 
civil life is the citizenship we want. 
As Milton said: 

"Peace hath her victories 
No less renowned than war." 



Theee are hundreds of men who sell 
their votes for a consideration — a 
thousand dollars, a five dollar bill, a 
83 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

glass of beer. In the aggregate, these 
men sell their country. A time may 
eome when supreme national interests 
depend upon the results of a close 
election. And the contest will go 
against the country because some men 
take money for their votes. 

"Thank God, I have a country to 
sell/' said O'Grady, member of the 
Irish Parliament that passed the Act 
of Union. O'Grady was a practical 
man and had realized several thousand 
pounds for his vote. Was he going to 
allow a mere matter of sentiment to 
interfere with a profitable deal? 

It is only a sentiment that actuates 
an. honest man in rejecting a bribe for 
his vote. But after all, money is not 
everything in this life. Every man's 
experience testifies to that. There are 
values beyond the ratings of dollars and 
cents. Chastity in a man or woman is 
only a sentiment, perhaps. Brutalize 
and materialize society to a certain 
point, and that will be its view of the 
case. That is no argument, however, 
against the value of a sentiment. 
Patriotism itself is a sentiment. So is 
that "sensibility of principle" and that 



84 



PERSPECTIVES. 

"chastity of honor" which feels a stain 
like a wound. Milton praises 

"that good earl, once president 
Of England's council and her treasury, 
Who lived in both unstained with gold or fee, 
And left then both, more in himself content." 

A long and honorable public career 
may be a matter of sentiment. A 
sterling sense of honor in private life 
may be a matter of sentiment. But 
there isn't money or property enough 
in the world, there isn't gold enough 
coined, plated, lost, buried or undug to 
buy a tenth part of these mere senti- 
ments at the value those who cherish 
them, hold them, and at the apprecia- 
tion we are glad to believe the public 
still puts upon them. 



85 



ATTITUDES. 

Power in 

Repose. The impressive feature, in the statu- 
ary of the Greeks, was power in repose. 
It is thus in all art, and it is thus in 
the part every man plays in life. In 
painting, poetry and oratory, the pleas- 
ing feature is the sense imparted of a 
possible higher flight, a fullness of 
power beyond— not put forth, but held 
in reserve. The great orator sways by 
his evident mastery over the deep feel- 
ing that possesses him, allowing it to 
break forth only now and then in a 
glow of passion, studied, controlled and 
dominated by reason; giving the 
impression that, thrilling as his periods 
are, he has thunder in reserve, that he 
is doing with ease what he might far 
excel did he but let himself out. This 
apparent ease of execution is the grace- 
fulness of art; for grace must have the 
quality of easiness, just as beauty gains 
by seeming unconscious of itself. 

Now, in life there is wisdom in the 
Biblical counsel:. "Let your self- 
restraint appear to all." The forgiv- 
86 



ATTITUDES, 

ing spirit seems the type of finest 
nobility of character, because it implies 
so much restraint. Patience, abstin- 
ence, courage, modesty and all the 
higher virtues partake of this quality. 



One's Own Experts, m cases of forgerv, testify 

Individuality. _ . .. . , ■ I i i 

that it is one chance in many hundreds 
of thousands that a man ever signs his 
name thrice in exactly the same 
manner. If the similarity occurs, it is 
generally true that microscopic investi- 
gation will discover pencil tracings 
which will demonstrate the forgery. 

Though coming from the hand of the 
same Maker, no two men are ever alike. 
Every creature has his individuality, 
his characteristic way and peculiar 
manner, which, out of all the things 
of the universe, he may most truth- 
fully call his own. This individuality 
should be cherished and not cheapened, 
because somewhere close to it lies the 
man's true worth and sincerity. If he 
has self-respect he will not hide his 
individuality. It will appear in all his 
actions. Men will feel that nobody else 
but he would have thought this or said 
that; nobody else but he would have 
87 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

done the job in just the way it has been 
done, or acted thus under similar 
circumstances. 

It is to be noted that this individu- 
ality permits us to separate its 
possessor from the monotonous many. 
It is to his life and the impress that 
he makes upon society something like 
a name or a designation. So if men 
wish to be known for their usefulness, 
they must develop those talents and 
aptitudes that they possess in the 
highest degree, and just in proportion 
as this is done will they have lived to 
a purpose. The crowd of servile 
imitators who never call their own 
individuality into play, live lives of 
inanity. But whether peasant, poet or 
politician, the man who is truest to his 
own instincts gives the world the most 
forceful service. 



sips of Moral courage is sometimes referred 

Character. ° 

to as "character." It indicates strength 
of will, and a right appreciation of 
principle. When little men are bend- 
ing to the whirlwind of excitement or 
succumbing to pressure, this man acts 
right in the face of prejudice or of his 
88 



ATTITUDES. 

own advantage, and all men in their 
secret souls admire his course. 

There are men who carry this method 
of action with them, as a kind of second 
nature, in all the affairs of life. They 
instinctively do right. There is no 
circuity or timeserving in their way of 
dealing with men and subjects. They 
establish a knowledge of their conduct 
in this respect among their neighbors, 
and it stands for their character. 

But manners are also taken as 
indicative of character. Men are 
loud, self-assertive and pushing. They 
grasp, crowd and over-reach. Other 
men are constitutionally timid. They 
do nothing bold or bad because they 
have no taste for it. They have the 
quiet, subdued bearing of gentlemen, 
but it is not so much the repose of 
character as the imbecility which comes 
from want of character. 

Where conscious power and able 
energy are quiet and unassuming, as 
when the "observed of all observers" 
places himself rather in the back 
ground; when merit takes the lowest 
seat at the banquet table; when there 
is every appearance of self-abnegation 
and unselfish attention to the wants and 
89 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS, 

pleasure of others, we certainly have the 
manners of a gentleman. And it is 
not unusual to take it for granted that 
such conduct is predicated upon a fine 
character, upon right sympathies and 
broad views. 

Still another direction in which a sign 
of character is often perceived is in one's 
likes and dislikes. A man who is faith- 
ful to his friends and hateful to his 
enemies is said to evince character. He 
is a worker in either case. There is 
nothing flabby or clammy about him. 
When he fights you will know that he is 
throwing his whole weight into the 
contest, and that he will go down with 
his flag flying, or hammer his way to 
victory. It is the militant disposition 
which is made of sterling stuff — for 
fighting. The Templar in Ivanhoe is 
an illustration. But, after all, was he a 
good man ? Other elements may be 
lacking. 

Goodness is taken as a frequent index 
of character. Austerity and piety 
denote a proper contempt for worHli- 
ness and a certain strength of will. 
The saint is thoroughly in earnest. He 
has a serious conception of life. If 
well-defined views of man's mission, 
90 



ATTITUDES. 

grown into deep convictions decisively 
influencing every action and modifying 
the whole course of one's life, count for 
anything, then the good man doubtless 
possesses character. 



91 



RECURRENCES. 

Causes There are times when old causes 
become wearisome. The gamut of arg- 
ument is exhausted. There is nothing 
more to be said. Advocacy runs into 
reiteration. The public is tired. It 
craves peace. It wishes the subject 
changed. Admitted that the cause is 
good; that the world needs conversion 
to it; that ceaseless agitation seems to 
be the only means. Yet the sympa- 
thetic public mind is like the farmer's 
soil. It wants a rotation of crops. It 
wants to follow the good old Biblical 
rule — to lie fallow for a while, so that 
its nerves may regain their normal 
condition, and its emotions may be 
calmed and solaced. 

This is the reason that the world 
eagerly turns to new causes — when they 
are opportunely broached. Presented 
at the high tide of some thoroughly 
earnest movement, they wait for atten- 
tion; but in the ebb tide they quickly 
attract notice, repute and adherence. 
92 



RECURRENCES. 

The world of thought and action does 
not rotate about one center. There are 
various circles engaging men's minds 
and sympathies and energies. While 
the moral world is troubled by one 
movement, a separate and distinct move- 
ment may be widening out in the polit- 
ical sea. Of course, these circles cut 
into each other and absorb each other. 
And all have their counterparts and 
consequences. After a movement has 
practically disappeared in the moral 
world, it may reappear in the world of 
politics. The Quaker sect was agitated 
with an anti-slavery movement nearly 
a half century before the storm burst 
with decided force upon the political 
sea. 

Side by side with an anti-divorce 
movement in morals may proceed a civil 
service reform in politics, an industrial 
training movement in education, and an 
eight-hour agitation in the economic 
world. None of these movements may 
be strong enough, deep enough or per- 
manent enough to widen out from 
morals into politics, or from education 
into morals. But this sometimes does 
happen when the world is thoroughly in 
earnest. The slavery agitation swept 
93 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

every chord, political, social, moral and 
literary. 

In the domain of human rights, and 
in the moral world there is really 
nothing new or unfamiliar. There 
would seem to be no room here for new 
causes. And yet new causes are perpet- 
ually arising. They have all the indi- 
cations of novelty. They have new 
applications to begin with. There are 
new ears open to them. They choose 
new names, new watchwords, new 
leaders and new fields. 

Analyzed with accuracy, however, 
these supposed "new causes" are really 
old contentions and old movements 
rehabilitated. Deep down, are the same 
principles. They rest on the same 
foundations. We can recognize in them 
affairs that have been before the world 
in former years. Daniel Webster made 
speeches for civil service reform in the 
'30's. Jesuit Fathers taught manual 
training to an extinct civilization in 
Paraguay two hundred years ago. Wat 
Tyler was the predecessor of the 
Knights of Labor, and there were 
mediaeval prototypes of prohibition. 
The crinoline of 1886 was a reappear- 
ance of that of 1865. 
94 



RECURRENCES. 

This phenomenon is symptomatic of 
the public desire for change and 
variety. If there is right and truth 
behind a movement, we can never be 
sure that its present disappearance is 
any evidence that it is permanently 
dead. It is merely permitting the 
public to take a rest. It will burst in 
upon the world later on in a new form, 
with new energy. The fittest survive. 
Weak and fanciful ideas have no second 
birth, but right and truth enjoy an 
eternal renascence. 



'Paramount It is alleged that one of the deep 
questions over which some mediaeval 
school-men cudgeled their erudite brains 
was : "How many angels can dance on 
a needle point?" Did they ever find 
out? Not that we know of; and the 
problem is really not worth a journey 
to heaven. 

Questions of this kind will settle 
themselves eventually. Perhaps the 
cowled school-men ascertained with 
mathematical nicety the answer to their 
problem the day after they touched the 
green sward of the other world. 

So the future will answer for us many 
95 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

of the questions of "paramount rights" 
that we now somewhat fruitlessly dis- 
cuss. The mutual rights of the Church 
and State was another Middle Age 
question over which men-at-arms as well 
as schoolmen perturbed themselves. It 
was the issue between the Popes and the 
Emperors: Kingcraft versus priest- 
craft — the canonists versus the hired 
lawyers of the monarch. 

This question is in process of most 
agreeable settlement in these, our days. 
Between the Church and the State there 
is towering up the Individual both in 
his Personal and his Family Eelations. 
It is he who is umpiring the old game 
once bloodily fought out between 
Guelph and Ghibelline. 

The Individual is putting limitations 
upon the State that the Popes long ago 
craved for. Our Constitutions are 
mainly (especially in their Bills of 
Eights) limitations upon State power — 
so many "Thou shalt nots" that the 
majority and the Legislature must 
obey. The Individual also has upon 
his side the spirit of the age and the 
tendency of the times. There is 
Jeffersonian Democracy arguing that 
the least government is the best govern- 



RECURRENCES. 

ment — that the State should not only 
keep off the grounds that the Constitu- 
tion prohibits it from entering, but that 
it shall also, through motives of exped- 
iency, public policy, liberty and popular 
character, keep off other grounds as 
well. The Great Voluntary Agencies 
to which modern society has given birth, 
such as the press, the school, the private 
association and the Church, are excel- 
lently performing much of the work 
that the State formerly bungled and 
blundered at. 

The canonists may feel relieved from 
laying down with precision what the 
State "must" and "must not" do. 
Suarez was far in advance of his age. 
But we are catching up to the "known 
laws of ancient liberty." Those who 
speak of the Church asserting para- 
mount rights over the State, or those 
who think it necessary for the Church 
to lay down the limits of State power, 
are really listening to echoes of a con- 
flict whose turmoil is four hundred 
years back. 



Lost Arts. Somebody, who wants to interest the 
public, might find a mine of entertain- 
97 



OUTLOOKS AN© INSIGHTS. 

ment in looking after "the lost arts." 
The stained glass of the middle ages 
and the wonderful "Greek fire" spoken 
of in the description of sieges and naval 
fights, are topics of live interest to this 
inventive age. Can we rediscover this 
lost knowledge of man ? Can we revive 
the erudition of the Alexandrian library 
or resurrect the Eabbinical lore of the 
Jews? 

Perhaps we can. But there are other 
lost arts, too. Chivalry is one of them. 
Faith is said to be another. But 
neither faith nor chivalry is wholly lost. 
We are simply deprived of the mediaeval 
article. It comprised qualities which 
would greatly enrich the faith and 
courtesy of the modern world. To this 
extent faith is a lost art. The saints 
and the miracles of other ages seem no 
longer to favor this age. But this may 
be due to a failure to see the good lives 
that are being led and a failure to 
appreciate the great wonders that are 
transpiring. The French infidel who 
said that he would not go to see the 
Ascension of Christ, even if that event 
should reoccur in the Paris of the nine- 
teenth century, typifies a species of 
unbelief that is current. Such men 



RECURRENCES, 



follow the agnostic in declaring that 
"they thank God that they are atheists/' 



R*Y«renc«. JSTor has the estimable quality of rev- 
erence departed from the modern world. 
There is as much of it as ever; only it 
is differently distributed. We still 
admire and esteem greatness, goodness, 
purity and worth-in-position. 

The world of other days reverenced 
a king, apart from his character. The 
modern world reverences a good king 
but despises a bad king. That is the 
difference. We do not altogether think 
of the place or the function; we think 
also of the man who fills it and the 
character he bears. This disposition to 
make reverence a matter of reason 
improves the quality of the reverence as 
well as the breed of kings. We are 
obtaining a better class of kings than 
those of other centuries. If the king 
is not nature's nobleman — a gentleman 
—we do not care to number him among 
our acquaintances. But if his charac- 
ter is exalted as well as his station, and 
his life as pure as his function is grand, 
then there is more reverence in our quiet 
esteem and confidence in him than in all 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

the obsequious bowings and plaudits of 
a half superstitious and half-ignorant 
multitude. 

Reverence departed? Not at all. 
It is only those, who in high station 
have failed to deserve reverence, that 
fancy the modern world has no rever- 
ence. 'Tis a way they have of flattering 
themselves. If reverence were given 
out of mere respect for place and func- 
tion it would be no better than a time- 
server and a parasite. I think more of 
the friendship and manliness of him 
who gives to an ordinary baronet high 
esteem that he would never give to a 
mean king, than I do of the hypocrite 
who pretends to honor the miserable 
king out of respect to his office but 
deliberately forgets the worthy baronet's 
name. 



100 



THE KNOWLEDGE OF EVIL, 

a Question «a RED cheeked peach that does not 
innocence, know anything but the dew and the sun, 
and to grow sweet and pretty — it goes 
wrong when it is wrenched off the stem 
and eaten by a hog," which, paraphrased 
in a newspaper article, reads this way: 

"A rosy cheeked girl who does not 
know anything but a mother's love and 
a father's love, and day by day grows 
sweet and pretty — she goes wrong when 
she is torn away from home and thrown 
where the temptations and pitfalls of 
vice are about her." 

We do not like to believe that inno- 
cence—trustfulness in the goodness of 
human nature, is a source of weakness 
amid the struggles of life in a great city. 
Must we educate against this innocence 
in order to protect the pathway of the 
virtuous ? 

In any event, it is a safe and practi- 
cal step for men and women of good- 
will, everywhere to oppose all things 
that may deceive innocence, and to do 
101 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

away, even by force and violence if 
necessary, with the pitfalls that ensnare 
the unwary. Christian civilization 
should mean a state of society, in which 
innocence may live unscathed, and 
unendangered ; and purity, may go 
about without guardianship, much as 
the lady in the Irish ballad : 

"Rich and rare were the gems she wore, 
And a bright gold ring on her wand 3he bore 
But oh ! her beauty was far beyond 
Her sparkling gems or snow white wand." 

'•Lady! dost thou not fear to stray 
So lone and lovely through this bleak way? 
Are Erin's sons so good or so cold 
As not to be tempted by woman or gold?" 

"Sir Knight ! I feel not the least alarm. 
No son of Erin will offer me harm— 
For though they love women and golden store, 
Sir Knight ! they love honor and virtue more." 



An St. Paul said, "Let not such things 

Apostolic 

Caution, even be mentioned among Christians" 
— or words to that effect. 

And yet St. Paul went in for the 
purification of society. He was a 
preacher of the highest morality to an 
age when the Eoman world was being 
undermined by voluptuousness and in- 
dulgence. If ever a preacher had mate- 
rial and provocation to paint the evils 
102 



THE KNOWLEDGE OF EVIL. 

in society with a teeming sensational- 
ism, the opportunity was St. Paul's. 

He did not do it. He refrained. The 
advertisement of corruption in all the 
red lights of rhetoric, with a little mor- 
al appended and "thou shalt not/' — was 
not his method. People do not need to 
have evil described to them in order to 
avoid it. The knowledge of evil may 
be a temptation to evil. The fewer 
"If Christ Came to Chicago" books that 
go from the press the better. The fewer 
exploitations of "Maiden Tributes/' 
issued in behalf of good morals, the bet- 
ter for good morals. 

Degenerate It has been somewhere remarked — 
and with no little truth — that it is the 
monotony of good and the variety of 
evil that accounts for the sins of the 
average man. Naturally he prefers 
well-doing. His reason strongly ap- 
proves right living and, in his remorse, 
condemns any deviation from correct 
principles. But goodness is monoton- 
ous — evil, if it is all known, gets to be 
attractive as a break in the hum-drum 
of regularity and virtue. 

So, very often, as a kind of relaxa- 
tion, otherwise sensible men have "made 
103 



Tendencies. 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

a night of it ;" gone on a wild carousal, 
breaking all their rules of rectitude, 
virtue and honor. Their cool reason in- 
forms them that, leaving moral con- 
siderations wholly out of the question, 
there is no pleasure whatever in the 
"good time" that is had in debauchery 
and late hours. The taste for variety 
is, to their cooler second thought, the 
only explanation for a proceeding that 
they strongly condemn when it is over. 

Now, it is just possible that there is 
something wrong in a life of regularity 
which has a craving for the variety of 
sin. A wholesome method and condi- 
tion of living has its satisfactions 
within the moral code. It has no erotic, 
erratic or abnormal promptings. There 
is incipient disease somewhere, if there 
is an overdose of temptation to be re- 
sisted. We are not all to be tried as St. 
Anthony was in the desert. We are 
flattering ourselves if we think so. 
Such exhibitions of moral fortitude are 
given only great saints. Ordinary mor- 
tals, in a normal condition of living, are 
providentially exempted from too much 
of the devil. 

In our goody-goody hum-drum dog- 
trot method of living, Ave are to inquire 
104 



THE KNOWLEDGE OF EVIL. 

for the seeds of moral disease before 
waiting to be iaid up on the sick bed 
of sin. People take long journeys for 
their physical health or change their 
business to avoid bodily mishaps. It 
may be that similar upliftings from a 
rut are needful to the moral welfare of 
man. He may need adversity to put 
him on his mettle: responsibility to 
give him aim and purpose: change of 
location to get away from depressing 
or degrading associations. Let people 
of good reputation who crave at times 
the variety of evil, look to their moral 
hygiene. There is something bad about 
their goodness, — that is all. 



Black Art. The poor old devil is having a hard 
time with this modern agnostic com- 
munity. People won't believe in him. 
He gives evidence enough of his exist- 
ence, it is true, in this bad, wicked 
world. Eead the news dispatches of 
Monday, recording the devilment of the 
preceding day ! 

That is the "black art" that we are 

exclaiming against. It matters little 

what superstitious people may say or 

believe about men "being " possessed by 

105 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

the devil," or obtaining diabolical 
powers to do mischief. It matters little 
what skeptical people may say or believe 
about Satan not having power to actu- 
ally manifest himself in the flesh. 

We see enough of his "black art" in 
the misery and crime cropping out in 
our large cities. It is not natural that 
men should be so bad as to do these in- 
human, revolting things. We say, it is 
the devil and his black art. The trail 
of the serpent is over it all. Mephis- 
topheles is flitting around these dark 
places. Beelzebub is there. Satan is 
present. The witches are there, three 
times three, and three fold, with their 
devilish incantation about their bub- 
bling caldron, brewing evil for mankind. 

"Double, double, toil and trouble." 

We good people have so much to do 
getting rid of such material devilment 
that we can discover all about us (and 
sometimes within us) that we have no 
time to be led away, as the old Puritan 
Fathers at Salem were, with will-o'-the- 
wisp fancies about sorcerers and spirit 
rappers. For our part, we are willing to 
give all the witches in Christendom 
free scope to jump their brooms in the 
106 



THE KNOWLEDGE OF EVIL. 

clouds, if they will only catch up all the 
bad bartenders by the slack of the 
trousers and carry them off. 



107 



ENLARGING VISTAS. 

Unfinished Truth is unchangeable, but we our- 
Bibi©. selves change in our relation to truth. 
We come, year by year, to grasp it more 
fully and with great perfection; or by 
a series of mischances we drift away 
from its purity and completeness. 

Sir Isaac Newton, in the closing 
years of his life, said : "I do not know 
what I may appear to the world, but to 
myself I seem only like a boy playing 
upon the seashore, and diverting myself 
by now and then finding a pebble or a 
greater shell than ordinary, while the 
great ocean of truth lies all undiscov- 
ered before me." 

Man in his higher development is a 
progressive revelation unto himself. 
Emerson says : 

"Out from the heart of Nature rolled 
The burden of the Bible old, 
The litanies of the nations came 
Like the volcano's tongrue of flame, 
Up from the burning core below, 
The canticles of love and woe." 

Truth is in the Universe and in 
human intelligence, but Time and 
108 



ENLARGING VISTAS. 

struggle and events are necessary to de- 
velop it. "The laws of nature are the 
thoughts of God/' 

New epochs are new testaments. The 
Emancipation Proclamation, for in- 
stance, is a chapter (taken in connec- 
tion with the events that led up to it) 
worth)' of a place in any Bible. Every 
reform is a new dispensation, so far as 
it goes, and every reformer is a prophet 
or a sage. 

The volume of God's truth is too vast, 
and the process of its revelation too 
gradual, to make it possible for Moses 
or the procession of secretaries to 
human progress who followed him, to 
set it down within a single book. The 
idea of making the Bible a limitation 
upon one's beliefs appears narrow com- 
pared to the broader teaching, which 
makes the Church a supreme court, rul- 
ing over and collating a body of truth 
and revelation that books do not con- 
tain and that Time is still making 
clearer and fuller. 



Hush! Hush! Whatever leads to better living: 
whatever conduces to higher thinking: 
whatever inculcates principles of honor, 

109 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

virtue and honesty — all this is religion. 

But controversies have arisen and 
harsh things are said in defense of good 
teachings; and tranqtiil-minded people 
find this unpleasant. They want a re- 
ligion of perpetual peace. They will 
find it, alas ! nowhere on this side of the 
grave. 

Struggle seems to be a condition of 
life; and in every department of it — 
spiritual as well as material. If we 
read the lives of some of the greatest 
saints, we shall find that they were 
temptation-tossed and tribulation- 
driven, too. Doubts and anxieties and 
jealousies crossed their minds and they 
found need for all the grace that prayer 
and good works and the sacraments 
could impart. 

It is, possibly, indifferentism and 
worldliness in religion that craves so 
strongly for peace and quietude. Eeli- 
gious questions trouble the votary of 
pleasure and overtax the strength of the 
weakened spiritual nature. The idea of 
religious peace which comes about cry- 
ing "hush," "hush," is not a Christian 
idea. Controversies will arise and men 
will go at religious issues with the im- 
perfection of the human side showing 
110 



ENLARGING VISTAS. 

out most prominently. There will be 
stormy times in the council. Even 
scandals may arise, but all this, while 
regretable, is much better than drift- 
ing down the placid waters of indiffer- 
entism to the broad bay of doubt and 
disbelief. 



God's Time, ^he Almighty who made the world 
and with Whom resides the power to 
unmake it is reigning over it. In His 
own good time He will bring about the 
changes and reforms that seem desir- 
able. In the contemplation of His wis- 
dom our impatience should be silent. 

But possibly we are His instruments 
for the bringing about of those changes 
and reforms that seem desirable? In 
that case our concern is not in the 
smooth sailing nor the success of the 
movement in which we engage, but in 
the fullness with which we do our duty 
as we see it. "Act well your part — 
there all the honor lies/ 5 And therein 
all our responsibility is discharged. 
God^s purposes are not necessarily 
furthered by our personal victories : our 
defeats and failures may pave the way 
to the end we have labored for with- 
in 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

out apparent results. Martyrdom is de- 
feat; and yet in the history of religion 
and liberty, and progress, martyrdoms 
have frequently presaged and prepared 
the way for abiding success. 



"Think Y©r "Think ye that those upon whom the 
tower of Siloam fell were sinners above 
all those who dwelt in Jerusalem?" 

A Biblical text for the consideration 
of the thoughtful. Doubtless there 
were more responsible people in Jerusa- 
lem upon whom the tower of Siloam 
might as properly have fallen; but they 
escaped. 

That tower of Siloam has been tumb- 
ling every generation since the prophets 
walked in Judea. The question may be 
repeated here and now with equal per- 
tinence : 

Are not we, who fail to create a 
strong public opinion against social and 
industrial evil, sinners in every modern 
Jerusalem? And might not the tower 
of Siloam, in the shape of famine or 
pestilence, or fire or social obloquy, or 
financial crash, fall upon us to crush us 
for apathy and indifference ? 

It does sometimes so transpire. And 
112 



ENLARGING VISTAS. 

when the afflicted community asks what 
it has done to deserve the calamity, this 
is frequently the accurate answer. Why 
the awful visitation of a civil war with 
its loss of a million of lives and millions 
of money; the infliction, too. upon the 
North which enslaved no negroes ? We 
paid the penahy of fifty years of apathy 
and the price of a sort of public con- 
science that mobbed Garrison and mur- 
dered Lovejoy. 

What have we, orderly, church-going, 
industrious people, to answer for that 
there are squalor and misery in the 
hovels of Pennsylvania wage workers; 
that hundreds of children recruit the 
schools of vice in the streets of large 
cities ; that drunkenness goes on in- 
creasing with the population ; that dens 
and dives fester in our great cities ; that 
disreputable elements come to the front 
in our ward politics ? We have no hand 
in the bringing about of these matters ; 
the contrary, if anything. 

Our responsibility is that we do not 
fight and agitate and clamor against 
the evil causes cropping out in such re- 
sults. We cannot go off apart from our 
brethren and save our own souls. If we 
want to divest ourselves of responsi- 
113 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

bility in and for those matters we must 
renounce the world. Living in it in 
any way, or co-mingling in its social or 
business activities in any degree, we are 
bound to recognize our partnership in 
the good and evil all about us, and do 
our duty in the premises. 



Swawfty? 1 The En g lish writer of verse, Coven- 
try Patmore, is credited with the fol- 
lowing utterance : "The world has al- 
ways been the dunghill it is now, and it 
only exists to nourish, here and there, 
the roots of some rare, unknown and 
immortal flower of individual human- 
ity. The holier and purer the small 
aristocracy of the true church becomes, 
the more profane and impure will be- 
come the mass of mankind." In other 
words : 

'God bless me and my wife, 
My son John and his wife, 
Us four and no more." 

Patmore, of course, counts himself, 
his wife, and his son John, among the 
small aristocracy of the true church. 

This species of theological insularity 
is not new. The "chosen people" had 
it bad. The Moslems displayed it in 
1U 



ENLARGING VISTAS. 

their conquests. The "believer" was 
"God's son"— : the Christian was a 
"dog." The Puritans resolved that 
they were the saints and the rest of the 
world was their's to plunder. 

We see this spirit applied on the mis- 
sionary side of the church. Christ told 
His apostles to go forth and preach the 
gospel to the whole world. Christianity 
was to be no monopoly. Xo "corner" 
was to be made on Salvation. The 
apostles had the spirit of the Messiah. 
When it came to a question of legislat- 
ing a Jewish regulation into the discip- 
line of the church they reasoned 
against it; no needless restrictions or 
burdens, repressive to the growth of 
Christianity, were to be created. So 
Christianity spread over the world 
under the preaching of apostles and 
saints, a study of whose lives discovers 
their singular breadth of view and tact 
of tolerance. 

But a narrower kind of Christianity 
has always existed. We have had in all 
ages good men, apparently fearful that 
heaven would be uncomfortably over- 
crowded for them if Christianitv were 
too widespread. They wish the society 
of Paradise to be quite select. Having 
115 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

a good thing in the gospel, they argue, 
we should keep it to ourselves. By 
hunting out heretics, engineering- 
schisms and formulating new restric- 
tions and regulations we can gradually 
freeze out hundreds of thousands of our 
fellow Christians. Then there will be 
more room for us lucky chosen people 
in heaven, and more of our, not as for- 
tunate neighbors, will have to go to hell. 
Hallelujah! And it's a material fire 
down there, too ! 

ideas Once upon a time a whole school of 
Pulpit, able preachers came to the Catholic 
Church as a result of a movement in 
Oxford University. The accession of 
Newman and his disciples "dealt a blow 
to the established church under which 
she still reels," said Disraeli; and the 
impetus in every line of thought and 
effort to the Catholic Church, from this 
accession, was correspondingly great. 

Newman himself was not a preacher 
in the ordinary sense; he usually read 
his sermons in an even tone of voice and 
without gesture ; but the preacher in the 
modern sense may be a writer of pam- 
phlets: in fact, the German bishop, 
Von Ketteler, once said that if St. Paul 
116 



ENLARGING VISTAS. 

came among us to-day to fulfill his mis- 
sion he would be a journalist. 

The Oxford movement, as a preach- 
ing force, gave strength to the Catholic 
Church in this : that it was an organ- 
ized school of ideas, backed by earnest- 
ness and learning. If we are to have 
a renaissance of the preacher — as dis- 
tinguished from the ecclesiastical man- 
ager (and both are useful) — we must 
look for it in something of the condi- 
tions which generated the Oxford 
movement : a strong seminary or uni- 
versity of learning, officered by a 
learned faculty, among whom are two 
or three men of the stamp of great 
teachers like Arnold or Newman, or of 
the apostolic mould like Manning. 

Contact with such men, in the acquis- 
itive stage of mental development, is 
not only education, but inspiration. It 
is as important to get the spirit of a 
university into the soul as its learning 
into the brain. The presence and influ- 
ence of a master mind — giving new 
forms to old truths and fresh adapta- 
tions to the wisdom of the books, put- 
ting the life of to-day into the learning 
of yesterday, engendering the enthusi- 
asm which glows from ideas which 
117 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

crave for action — this is the prime con- 
dition. And it is not the elocutionist 
nor the phrase-monger that is needed, 
nor whose lack has left the pulpit where 
it is ; the rattling of dry bones in theat- 
rical tones or the utterance of polished 
common-places w 7 ith unctious gusto will 
not meet the requirement. 

St. Paul, homely and under-sized, 
with a harsh voice, and Peter the Her- 
mit, gaunt and ungainly, were the 
preachers of their days, because they had 
a message to announce, and they knew 
it, and would tell what they had to tell, 
even if they ran up against death and 
destruction in the task. And the people 
listened, as they will listen "to any Ser- 
mon or Sermo when it is a Spoken 
Word meaning a Thing and not a Bab- 
blement meaning Nothing." 

Repairs Our church architecture is mediaeval. 

on the 

Church, it is a thing of time — not of eternity. 
We call it Gothic. All other relics of 
the Goths have gone, save a fragment 
of their literature. But the world has 
continued to copy their architecture. 
Not through any reverence, however. 
Simply for its grandeur — its spiritual 
effect, its great associations. 
118 



ENLARGING VISTAS. 

In the things of time there must be 
reason and utility as well as beauty. 
The life we lead' will not in all things 
submit to be ruled by the tomb, nor by 
ideas that came from brains, now dust. 
The strong, virile society that is, de- 
mands that the world about it shall con- 
form to its tastes and its needs. Those 
manifold agencies that minister to the 
moral and material wants of the people 
must evince a power of adaptability, or 
go down forever. Truth is unchange- 
able, but the language in which it is 
uttered changes and grows. Truth is 
unchangeable, but its clothes follow the 
fashion, or Truth is false to its own 
value in being indifferent to the duty of 
self-propagation. 

Now, those great buildings that man 
has entitled by a more ambitious name 
than any palace or tower of his craft — 
"houses of God" — are not too sacred to 
get beyond the law of adaptation. The 
external church may well typify by its 
architecture the unchanging nature of 
the Gospel and the great lineage of 
years that (of all existing things) be- 
longs to the Christian religion. The 
first Christian church was the Stable of 
Bethlehem, and if fidelity to the past 
119 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

were the true purpose, we should never 
get beyond that. It is not the external 
that we must look to, nor the symbolic. 
Utility is the thing. If beauty and 
symbolism and grandeur can be added, 
it is well ; if not, we must sacrifice them. 
Moderns have sometimes spoiled the 
chaste loneliness of the Gothic church 
by placing a school house adjoining; or 
even by filling its basement with the 
desecration of blackboard and spelling 
book. We may go further and add to 
the church other accessories demanded 
by the time that is — though unheard of 
in the time that was. We may not put 
our school into the church. We may 
keep the building dedicated to worship 
separate and alone. But we may put 
other institutions which elevate the so- 
cial life of the people side by side with 
the church and school as influences 
that go with the work of the modern 
church. In so doing we may mean no 
disrespect to the Goths or the Vandals. 
Our meaning is solely that the concern 
of the living Church is with living men, 
and not with dead barbarians. We suf- 
fer no loss of fine feeling when we put 
heirlooms on the shelf; and hasten to 
take up present and pressing duties. 
120 



THE GOSPEL FOE THE POOR. 
Moral j N an i(j novel called "The Anti- 

Samtation. 

quartan," a fishwife, named Maggie, re- 
plies to Mr. Oldbuek's criticism of 
dram-drinking : 

"Ay 5 ay — it's easy for your honor, 
and the like o' you gentle folks to say 
sae, that hae stouth and routh, and fire 
and fending, and meat and claith, and 
sit dry and canny by the fireside — but 
an ye wanted fire, and meat, and dry 
elaise, and were deeing o ? cauld, and 
had a sair heart, whilt is warst ava, wi* 
just tippence in your pouch, wadna ye 
be glad to buy a dram wiH, to be eild- 
ing and elaise and a supper and hearts- 
ease into the bargain, till the morn's 
morning ?" 

What reply is there to this which will 
convince the proponent? Drink is the 
cause of misery and misery is the cause 
of drink. We cannot expect the poor 
to furnish all the examples of moral 
heroism and self-restraint. Their con- 
dition is a state of temptation. On 
every side temptation appeals to them 
121 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

in the words of Romeo to the poor 
apothecary : 

'The world is not thy friend nor the world's law, 
The world affords no law to make thee rich, 
Then be not poor, but break it and take this." 

When there was a famine in Ireland, 
one section of the British people raised 
a fund to buy Bibles. And they offered 
the starving people books instead of 
bread. There are ways in which this 
mistake is repeated in a milder man- 
ner. When, for instance, we depend 
altogether upon Faith and preaching 
for the poor ; and do not care how they 
live so that they furnish examples of 
"edifying deathbeds." 

The aim of practical and religious 
well-doing should be to remove tempta- 
tion. 

Whatever will improve the worldly 
condition of the poor will improve their 
spiritual condition. Better houses, bet- 
ter sanitation, better wages, steadier 
work, savings banks, and those legisla- 
tive measures which may be termed 
"Christian socialism" are all praise- 
worthy. We do not know but that this 
is the way it was designed to have the 
gospel preached to the poor. 

122 



THE GOSPEL FOR THE POOB. 

Many pious people who eat good din- 
ners and sit by warm firesides have the 
phrase, "the poor are always with us," 
in their mouths for a totally different 
purpose than the Divine Teacher in- 
tended. 

It does not mean that poverty is a 
sanctified state. ISTor does it mean that 
misery and distress are insurmountable. 

We find rich bad people and poor 
good people ; but the general law con- 
nects poverty with sin, and comfort 
with virtue. There would be little 
avarice without want, little injustice 
without greed, and little intemperance 
without improvidence. 

The influence that improves a peo- 
ple's worldly condition is almost certain 
to improve their spiritual condition. 
The reign of religion among hovels 
and tenements exists, in spite of the 
surroundings, in protest against them 
and in opposition to them. The reign 
of religion among peaceful hamlets and 
prosperous farms exists in harmony 
with the salubrious environment, and 
assisted by its healthful atmosphere. 

To build solid piles of masonry dedi- 
cated to Christian worship and to pay 
through years of appeal and effort a 
123 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

universal indebtedness thereon, is one 
line of church work rendered impera- 
tive by the conditions of a new country 
and immigrant congregations. To in- 
stitute great devotions, grand revival of 
religious fastings and public prayer, 
may be a most salutary and wise direc- 
tion to lead the thoughts of the pious 
and faithful members of the congrega- 
tion. 

These directions of church effort, 
however, are only a few of the many 
functions which the Church discharges. 
The former is merely a preparation for 
work; the latter is a species of work 
which reaches only a limited number, 
and assists those who are already safely 
entrenched in the spirit and knowledge 
of their religion. 

Lessons of frugality, sobriety and in- 
telligence are a part of the Church's 
function. Throughout the middle ages 
the Church was a civilizing agency, 
leading in all reforms. The civilizing 
influence of the Church ought to con- 
tinue in the nineteenth century. Civil- 
ization should not and can not properly 
lead the Church, but Christianity ought 
to lead civilization. What the masses 
in our average congregations most need 

124 



THE GOSPEL FOR THE POOR. 

is the right kind of civilization. They 
need it badly — the young people quite 
as much as the old. The Church is the 
center of true civilization, and, as a 
positive influence in advocating tem- 
poral comfort, decency and social ele- 
vation, is merely doing a duty that it 
began to take up in the days of the 
Caesars. 

of C witir ati ° B lN the earl y a S eS ° f the Cllristian 

Era the missionaries began, and accom- 
panied their work of conversion by a 
work of civilizing. They cured the peo- 
ple of their ferocity, discouraged 
carousals and beastly diversions, and 
imparted a knowledge of the arts. 

The barbarian was convinced of the 
virtue of frequent ablutions. Cleanli- 
ness prepared the soil for the reception 
of truth. The nomadic habits of the 
Pagan were gotten rid of it. He be- 
came an agriculturalist and a man of 
peace. 

The early missionaries succeeded 
well. The civilization they spread was 
only an introduction to the Gospel. 

Wherever a like policy has been pur- 
sued it has also succeeded. The Jesuits 
made millions of Christians in China, 
125 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

largely because they could teach the 
Celestials the geography of the heavens 
as well as the heavenly faith. 

The modern missionary has a 
stratum of barbarism to penetrate in 
every city of Europe and America. 
There is a multitude of the great un- 
washed — savages nesting in the bosom 
of civilization. Moral influences, only, 
can reach or regenerate them. The 
modern missionary must civilize them 
as a prerequisite to Christianizing 
them. They must be cleansed exte- 
riorly and interiorly. Water is the 
means of attaining both kinds of clean- 
liness, and water is the civilization that 
must be preached. The public bath 
and the undiluted beverage are lines of 
missionary effort which go before much 
permanent Christianity. To neglect 
them is like expecting that a savage 
nation can be a Christian nation. 



Dkfner Who doubts that the recurrence of 
charity. Thanksgiving Day does the nation 
good? We are advised, while we feed 
liberally to feel generously. The good 
nature of the gourmet, however, has 
little merit. It is merely an aid to 
126 



© 



THE GOSPEL FOB THE POOR. 

digestion. The finest words of charity 
have been blocked out by grinding, 
grasping rhetoricians, whose record of 
giving is the only thing about them 
that might blush — if seen. It is a 
species of unthinking charity that re- 
gards the poor one or two days of the 
year, and forgets them the rest of the 
time. Our after dinner, fashionable 
charity is very much akin to the infan- 
tile thoughtlessness of the little 
princess, who, hearing it said that "the 
people starve for want of bread/' asked 
"why don't they eat cake, then?" 
Christmas and Thanksgiving are "'the 
cake days" of the year. We send turkey 
to the poor and virtually absolve our- 
selves from any further solution of the 
problem. It is a matter that well-fed 
people prefer not to contemplate, except 
as an addendum to fashion or as an aid 
to digestion. The novelist of Xew 
York society, Edgar Fawcett, says in 
a magazine article: "It seems to me 
that we touch the very horrible center 
of this unassuaged social sore when we 
state that most of our well-placed 
women, who could aid their kind, will 
not really aid them, and that they are 
bored unspeakably by even the small, 
127 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

dainty profferings of time and pin 
money which the modish churches they 
attend demand that they shall exploit." 
Charity has been considered too much 
as an accomplishment and too little as 
a duty. A thing of generous impulse, 
it has, less than any other of the great 
functions of social life, come under the 
control of a scientific development. Its 
constitution and by-laws, its philos- 
ophy, its evolution, have not even been 
begun. It is a thing of fits and starts, 
full of clap-trap in its manifestations, 
liable to uncharity and injustice in its 
operations, vulgar in its methods of 
money getting and perpetually prosti- 
tuted as a panderer to selfish and hypo- 
critical natures. 



charit val I T ma y be questioned whether "char- 
ity" in the old sense has any place in 
the modern vocabulary. Yet the same 
kind feelings and merciful motives are 
present with the modern world. Pro- 
gress has been accompanied by many 
mitigating influences; the penal codes, 
the penitentiaries, sanitary regulations, 
moral movements and a score of other 
facts attest this. At the same time 
128 



THE GOSPEL FOR THE POOB. 

there is not the spontaneous, free giv- 
ing that characterized other ages. 

The modern world dislikes the beg- 
gar. It abominates poverty. It would 
rather blame the mendicant than relieve 
him. It withholds bread until it satis- 
fies itself as to the worthiness of the 
petitioner. 

This disposition may not be as 
charming as the free and lavish charity 
of other days, but it is really preferable 
in the end. 

One source of poverty and beggary 
and misery has been the ease with 
which improvidence and intemperance 
could shift their burdens on the pru- 
dent, sober and industrious portion of 
the community. Doubtless there exist, 
to-day, organizations and establish- 
ments which assist improvidence by 
doing the begging in its stead. We 
refer to charity, organized on the 
mediaeval, as opposed to the modern 
idea. The gist of criminality in many 
things which are mala prohibita lies in 
the evil they do to society. In this 
sense improvidence and intemperance 
are criminal facts, and it is but just 
that they experience their natural pen- 
alties. Indiscriminate charity does not 
129 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

recognize this, and the result is that the 
improvident class may go on with their 
excesses, thoroughly assured that their 
orphaned children will in the end be 
better fed and sheltered than the chil- 
dren of the thrifty workingman in the 
tenement quarters. 

Charity, in its broadest sense, is the 
sum of all the virtues, and it can exist 
in its plentitude where there is no pov- 
erty and no necessity of giving. If men 
were just to their brother men — alms- 
giving would be unnecessary all around. 



Education Sympathetic charity shelters the 

in QiTing-. J 

orphan and nurses the sick and 
wounded in great hospitals. Intelli- 
gent charity builds schools and lecture 
rooms and institutes for young men in 
the cities, and creates influences that 
conflict with the bad habits of society. 
Sympathetic charity is mediaeval. 
Intelligent charity is modern. The 
modern world has improved mediaeval 
methods, as it should do. And it is no 
reflection upon the great good in 
mediaevalism to say that as the world 
has grown older it has learned some- 
thing. It has put more science and 
130 



THE GOSPEL FOR THE POOR. 

lees impulse into its charity. Though 
intelligent charity may not be as beau- 
tiful as sympathetic charity, it is many 
times mtfre useful. 

Sympathetic charity is pathological 
— it waits for the ills and treats the 
disease. It picks up the waifs and 
wrecks of society; its hospitals and 
reformatories and asylums have no 
connection with the healthy current of 
the community's being. 

Intelligent charity is hygienic. Its 
ounce of prevention is always worth a 
pound of cure. But just as the doctor, 
whose timely advice saves us from 
grievous disease, has less glory than the 
physician who brings us safely through 
a dangerous illness, so intelligent char- 
ity has less of the glamor of benevol- 
ence, but more of the substance, than 
sympathetic charity. It is in direct 
communication with the wholesome 
currents of life in the community's 
being, and exercises a strongly forma- 
tive influence. Its schools teach 
creeds; its lecture rooms breed opin- 
ions ; its institutes for young men give 
it the control of the future. 

The state ought to take care of the 
functions usually discliirged by sym- 
131 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

pathetic charity, and voluntary charity 
should direct itself to the hygienic 
works of benevolence. Our education 
in giving is largely neglected, and we 
are too much controlled by societies 
having their origin in non-modern con- 
ditions and which impose their choice 
of beneficiaries upon us. We wait to 
be asked; we do not choose before 
giving. 

In a special locality, which element 
has the better hold on the future — that 
which builds a non-sectarian hospital 
or that which builds a Young Men's 
Christian Association hall ? — that 
which spends its energies on building 
an asylum that competes with the State 
asylum or that which builds lecture 
rooms and lyceums? The one element 
concerns itself with the dead or decay- 
ing membranes of the body politic; — 
the other infuses itself into the healthy 
life blood of the living community. 



Brains and "Malice, prepense and afore- 
thought" deepen and blacken the crime 
that follows. The deed is more cruel, 
more malignant and more diabolical. 
It is a finished piece of villainy. It 
132 



THE GOSPEL FOR THE POOR. 

corrodes and festers. It spreads itself 
like an epidemic, of hell. Felony done 
upon the impulse may end with the act. 
There are no consequences. The crime 
is blotted out in its own horror. But 
the effects of premeditated evil remain. 

The law of good and evil is the same 
in this respect. 

Calculated well-doing is ten times as 
beneficial as impulsive well-doing. 
Impulsive generosity is a fine trait but 
calculated benevolence is much finer. 
Charity and alms-giving are good; but, 
with greater intelligence, comes a 
demand for a higher sort of charity. 
The creation of systems and forces 
which are charitable in their effects is 
the best phase of modern charity. 

That kind of well-doing which unites 
brain and heart, which joins intelli- 
gence with goodness, is the desideratum. 



133 



AMERICANISM. 

Americlnism? With respect to the five foreign- 
born millions, settled in the United 
States, and their ten million children, 
the phrase "Americanism" has several 
special meanings — some of them 
wrong, most of them right and com- 
mendable. 

There is intolerant and irreverent 
Americanism. It must be remembered 
that the German, the Frenchman and 
the Italian are not barbarians; they 
have been accustomed to a civilization 
of their own. Americanism cannot im- 
pose itself upon them. They came here 
to enjoy liberty; and they have ballots 
to cast and some choice to exercise. 
Blatant Americanism is vulgar, and 
when it becomes hysterical over its own 
unaccepted blandishments it is ridicu- 
lous as well. All organizations of the 
Know-Nothing kind, flying a flag of 
proscriptive Americanism, have found a 
truer Americanism up in arms against 

• them. 

134 



AMERICANISM. 

In the following respects the phrase 
"Americanism" has a special and com- 
mendable meaning for foreign elements 
here settled : 

1. Fealty to the democratic form of 
government. 

2. An appreciation of the necessity 
of educating the people; and a thorough 
reliance upon the eventual wisdom of 
an intelligent democracy. 

3. Opposition to all tendencies rep- 
resented by such expressions as "the 
higher class/" "the ruling element," 
"the American aristocracy," "the plu- 
tocracy." 

4. Belief in the right of every man 
to make the most of his opportunities, 
to pitch his ambitions as high as pos- 
sible, to better his condition, to rise 
above his station, to question and rebel 
against all conventional opinions which 
hold him down. 

5. A conception of good citizenship 
as something based on Christian moral- 
ity. Hence, an insistence on character 
and integrity in public officials and a 
desire for purity and honesty in politics. 
Necessarily this position must tend to 
a dislike for such influences as saloon- 
ism and semi-political corporations. 

135 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

6. A natural result of the feeling of 
fraternity, which grows out of the equal- 
ity of every democratic community, is a 
desire for common standards, common 
customs and mutual confidence among 
neighbors. 

For this reason Americanism is prone 
to be anti-masonic. It dislikes political 
vereins and clans organized upon the 
basis of nativity; it is offended with 
customs of a foreign aspect which crop 
out too loudly upon the quiet of the 
American Sunday. That some of the 
ministerial brethren have spoken hys- 
terically on this subject, does not de- 
prive it of its essential merits; a brass 
band, escorting a Turn-Verein past a 
Methodist church on Sunday morning, 
is certainly an invasion of the fitness of 
things. 

The feeling of fraternity may at 
times menace individual liberty, with its 
plans for a common language, a com- 
mon method of bringing up children 
and other common enterprises. Never- 
theless, the feeling itself, if it curbs its 
desire Lr over-legislation, is not repre- 
hensible. 

The American of the future, whether 
his father came from Heidelberg with 
136 



AMERICANISM. 

Sigel, or from London with John Win- 
throp, has a right to whatever is best in 
the world's fair of ideas and customs. 
Tradition should not be a law against 
progress. 



En^froSLent. Having higher ideals, American 
civilization rises superior in its reali- 
se ties to that of any other country. Even 
through the cobwebs of prejudice, one 
will have to acknowledge that a crowd 
of Americans selected at random are 
better gentlemen than a crowd of Euro- 
peans similarly selected. Their habits 
are cleaner; their morals, all things 
considered, are purer; and they are 
vastly more intelligent, more observant 
and more thoughtful. 

We should neither exaggerate nor 
minimize the influence of breeding, 
The conditions which have surrounded 
the American community have been 
favorable. The man who went into the 
woods with his pioneer axe and there 
hewed his right to a home, was nature's 
nobleman. He could hardly help, con- 
sidering his environment, to become a 
man of simple tastes, courageous 
methods, and with the American crav- 
137 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

ing for schooling, a man of honest in- 
telligence. 

The conditions were different in the 
case of a peasantry constantly admon- 
ished to remain contented with their 
lot; disciplined to fill the ranks of 
standing armies like cattle driven to 
market; conscious that they were the 
lower order and social servants to a no- 
bility. Or, if not in this category, a 
miserable, half-starved tenantry, domi- 
nated by a set of mean-spirited scoun- 
drels, their landlords, and a prey, with 
very little moral or spiritual counter- 
effort, to habits of intemperance 
brought among them by their lords. 

It is easy to perceive which environ- 
ment favored the cultivation of higher 
ideals. While the greatest ambition of 
the plucked tenant or the subdued 
peasant was to keep the wolf from the 
door and maintain his station, the 
American woodsman or the young-man- 
come- West proceeded to grow with the 
growth of the country and to expand in 
desire and effort with the idea that his 
was an equal partnership in a great 
enterprise. 

If there are impressionable elements 
of population in our midst, to which 
138 



AMERICANISM. 

mass may they most advantageously be 
attached? Shall we send the currents 
of old world debility through them, or 
shall we tone them up with the electric 
vitality of youth, vigor, high hopes and 
advanced ideals? What do the doctors 
say? There are quacks who prefer the 
policy of segregation — shutting out the 
American sun as an irritant and the 
American atmosphere as a corruption. 
But the inevitable drift is the other 
way. The people naturally gravitate 
towards whatever is best in method and 
ideal. Not without quackery leaving its 
malign effects, for undoubtedly it has 
created great obstacles, caused much de- 
lay and occasioned considerable loss. 



Beyond The "poor whites" are inhabitants 
station, of the middle southern tier of Ameri- 
can states. A Scotch and Irish colonial 
ancestry is attributed to them, although 
it is probable that they draw quite as 
largely from the lower stratum of the 
English population. Often they are so 
devoid of energy and self -improvement 
that even the negro population fail to 
respect them. To the colored gentry 
they are "white trash." 

139 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

Yet from this race came such men as 
Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, 
the greatest of the presidents since 
Washington and Jefferson. Obviously 
Lincoln reasoned in this way: "Be- 
cause my parents and grandparents 
were born to this low social condition, 
it doesn't follow that I have to stay 
there. I see better things beyond me 
and higher things above me. Why 
should I not honorably go out of the 
house of Want and occupy the house of 
HaveT 

The theory of certain sociologists is 
that Lincoln could not do this; his in- 
feriority was bred in the bone ; heredity 
was against him — the poor ambitions, 
nerveless purposes and wandering 
habits of his race created too over- 
whelming a balance of probabilities 
against his rise. 

And the preachments of certain 
moralists bore in the same direction. 
Why should Lincoln want to rise ? Why 
should he crave things above his sta- 
tion ? Why should he not be content to 
stay down where his fathers and grand- 
fathers were before him? Was he not 
flying in the face of Providence ? 

Lincoln does not appear to have real- 
140 



AMERICANISM. 

ized that Providence had any grudge 
of this kind against him, and he cer- 
tainly started out to disappoint the the- 
ories of the sociologists. Studying law 
by the light of a pine knot; passing 
through the different phases of petti- 
fogging in a country town; jostling 
with all sorts of companionships, but 
winning all by his homely wit, he rose 
from one point to another, like a climb- 
ing athlete, until he stood at the head 
of the nation. Then it was said that 
this "rail-splitting western poor white" 
must be placed under the tutelage of 
Seward and Chase, "nien to the manor 
born," or his administration would be 
a failure; but in the way he had com- 
pelled respect at the country bar, and in 
the congress of the United States by 
solid merit, by the great gift of unos- 
tentatious common sense, Lincoln was 
more the chief of his cabinet by mental 
superiority than any president since 
Jefferson. 

JsTow, there are other races concern- 
ing which sociologists are not so severe 
as with the poor white; although nar- 
row national prejudices exert a depre- 
eiative influence. The Celt on the 
banks of the Seine is the intellectual, 
141 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

the political and social leader of civil- 
ized Europe; but the Celt on the Shan- 
non has been a hewer of wood and a 
drawer of water from father to son — 
in some cases as long as grass grows 
and water runs. 

Everybody understands that this re- 
sult was not accomplished without the 
hydraulic pressure of compulsory ignor- 
ance, enforced poverty, legal robbery 
and martial rule exerted through cen- 
turies. 

Cast upon the shores of the Ameri- 
can states comes a poor emigrant — a 
wreck from a famine-stricken land in 
a fever-laden vessel — with his family. 
It is a passage from the struggle of the 
hovel to the hell of the tenement; of 
that emigrant family there survives 
but a boy of a dozen years. He drifts 
a waif into the interior of the states, 
doing the errands of theaters and the 
odd jobs of actors. But he does not 
appear content with his station. The 
right to rise above all adversity is in- 
spired with the air he breathes. His 
advance is not rapid, but it is won step 
by step on the solid stairway of merit, 
until the elite of all the great cities 
crowd to hear him and pay tribute of 
142 



AMERICANISM, 

applause to his dramatic power and 
finish ; all America has known and hon- 
ored Lawrence Barrett. 

We are the architects of our own for- 
tunes. Success is merely a question of 
how high we place our ideals and how 
earnestly we try to reach them. It is 
not in our stars, but in ourselves, if we 
are underlings. 

theWorid. Eveby American is proud of the 
country's institutions; but the noblest 
and best of all our institutions, perhaps, 
is the hope which may be born in the 
breast of the bootblack or newsboy in 
the streets, that he may one day be 
president. 

Class lines are forming here, it is 
true. And great fortunes and "first 
families" gangrene the democracy of 
fifty American cities, but the day is not 
yet past when even of the respected 
members of our United States senate 
an incident like the following may be 
told: 

In 1882 a dinner party was given in 
New York city. Senator Davis, of 
West Virginia, sat at one end of the 
table, Senator Cameron, of Pennsyl- 
vania, sat at the other, and Gen. W. T. 
143 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

Sherman at the head. The general be- 
gan a reminiscence of his life by say- 
ing: 

"When I was a lieutenant- 



"Come, now, Sherman/' interrupted 
Mr. Davis, "were you ever a lieu- 
tenant ?" 

"Yes, Davis/' he replied, "I was a 
lieutenant about the time you were a 
brakeman on a freight train/' 

"Well, boys/' observed Cameron, "I 
don't suppose either of you ever cut 
cordwood for a living, as I did." 

Now, when there is so much talk of 
improving the condition of the labor- 
ing population, it must not be over- 
looked that in case labor gets all it de- 
mands, the workingman will be a day 
laborer still. 

A remedy to each individual man, 
better than eight hours or more pay, is 
to attempt to rise out of the ranks of 
labor altogether. Cease to be of that 
class if you can. You, thereby, better 
your condition and you leave a place 
Vacant for the idle army of men who 
can't find work to do. 

In this country no man is confined to 
"his station." Ambition is not a crime. 
It is the duty and the interest of every 
144 



AMERICANISM. 

man to rise in the world; and rise he 
can if he enters upon the struggle with 
a will. 

No station is too good for you. No 
station is beyond your strength or your 
capacity. Set no limits to your possi- 
bilities. Aim high, and when you have 
done your best be satisfied with the re- 
sults. 

This is the American style of settling 
the labor question: The laborer be- 
comes a farmer, a storekeeper or an em- 
ployer himself. Instead of casting his 
lot with Hungarian, Bohemian, Meck- 
lenburg and Polish emigrants, who 
can't speak English and do not know 
the country, he takes advantage of his 
common school education and his Eng- 
lish speech, and hires the Hungarians 
to work for him. 

Of course, we must always have a 
laboring class, and it is the part of wis- 
dom and benevolence to see that the 
cause of labor is promoted. It is at 
present, perhaps, the greatest duty we 
owe to society. 

But no immutable law compels any 

man to remain a laborer forever. There 

must be rotation in the industrial 

world. If there is rotation, the yoke of 

145 



OUTLOOKS ANB INSIGHTS. 

labor will not be so burdensome as it 
might otherwise be. Under present 
hardships, there will be the hope of bet- 
ter times and more independent posi- 
tion. The workingman will not go to 
his daily toil as if he were 

"At the mill with slaves, 
Condemned to labor under Philistian yoke." 

His existence will not be the drudgery 
of one who lives "from hand to mouth," 
but the energy of one who is making 
progress towards better things. 



146 



THE PEOPLE KING. 
Ordinary \^ E are all educated. We vote. We 

People. 

are sovereigns and peers. None of us 
is so insignificant that he can be 
trampled upon or pushed off the 
common highway. Nevertheless what 
ordinary, common place individuals 
make up our vast centers of population. 
What little originality of character! 
what scarcity of true learning! what 
lack of genuine nobility! what rarity 
of real manhood, eighteen carats fine! 

We have immense libraries stored 
with tomes of weighty thought. But 
the mob of readers devour the news- 
paper and the fiction. We have great 
standing armies of teachers, but they 
carry the mass of children no further 
than their parents went. One genera- 
tion halts where the other halted — at 
the rule of three — at the half-way 
house of common schooling. 

In the brigades of wearied wage 

workers, in the army of clerks leading 

a hand-to-mouth existence, in the mob 

of the grain pit, among the shysters and 

147 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

quacks and serni-quacks of the profes- 
sions, few rise above the ordinary role. 

Mean and commonplace motives pre- 
vail. Bread and butter is the absorb- 
ing aim. Heads are turned by alder- 
manic and mayoralty honors. Higher 
laws or broader incentives are not 
understood. They speak over the heads 
of the populace, who talk in the style 
and on the plane of philosophy. 

"Fifty million of bores," thus has 
Carlyle described this great people. 
And Lowell finds us "the most com- 
mon-schooled and the least cultured" of 
races. 

The inspired preacher has no chance 
to be heard by our masses. The back- 
woods revivalist, veneered or unve- 
neered, catches the public ear most 
quickly. Eead the speeches that win 
campaigns and tickle the sovereign 
people. What sophistry, what dogmat- 
ism, what crude expression ! We talk 
of Shakespeare; by nine out of every 
ten he is never read ; by ninety-nine out 
of every hundred he is never admired or 
understood. We assume to arrive at 
religious opinions; but with what 
absence of research; with what lack of 

148 



THE PEOPLE KING. 

close, earnest, thorough going contem- 
plation and reasoning ! 

Taking people as they are, we must 
lay hold of the commonplace, in words 
and methods, to move their minds and 
influence their actions. They are not 
without their saving virtues. What- 
ever is plain, direct and honest, they 
like. The force of justice is clear to 
them. They are not blind to forgive- 
ness and mercy. Go-ahead-edness, 
courage, constancy and sincerity claim 
their respect and conciliate their favor. 
The scholar has often failed ; the genius 
has not blossomed; the preacher has 
been a mere nonentity and the philoso- 
pher a do-nothing, simply because each 
and all have not felt or known that the 
world is full of ordinary people. 

^ Ethics. "What is democracy striving for? 
What is the franchise worth to the 
masses if they sell their votes for beer? 
What is the self-government of cities 
worth if its features are municipal 
extravagance, willful waste in adminis- 
tration and bossism in political machin- 
ery ?" 

"Give us the net results to good gov- 

149 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

eminent, to popular virtue and intelli- 
gence, to progress and civilization \" 

We have to admit that frequently 
democracy gives us bad city administra- 
tions, and that if the test of the best 
government were that which is best 
administered, aristocracy and mon- 
archy could often show better results. 
In the pandemonium of a caucus, and 
in the bribery and debauchery of a 
political canvass, it sometimes seems as 
if the people were getting very little 
good of it all; that it were better for 
them if they had no votes to be bought 
or beered for. 

But there are other considerations. 
There is everywhere a large thinking 
and reading element who vote upon a 
careful judgment of the issues involved. 
The campaign does not succeed without 
the political speech— pitched, it is true, 
to a low grade of intelligence, but, 
nevertheless, an appeal to reason, and 
in that respect, an education. The 
ballot itself gives a sense of responsi- 
bility to the voter and makes him aware 
of his individual share in the common- 
wealth. 

The mob may be loud and blatant, 
but it is not "dumb, driven cattle" at 
150 



THE PEOPLE KING. 

least. Out of it all comes much good. 
There are sentiments and convictions 
that at times swky the great democratic 
community in a way that seems to 
justify the stump-speaker's appeal to 
"this intelligent people." A wave of 
patriotism, a revulsion against political 
dishonesty, an uprising against mon- 
opoly, all speak well for the growing 
capacity of democracy. Blunder as it 
may, the People-King is the best ruler, 
for staying qualities, that society has 
yet found. 



Level Up. We wish to level up. If there is any 
levelling down to be done, it should 
transpire with the ulterior end of level- 
ling up. To crush aristocracies is 
levelling down, but the ulterior purpose 
is raise the democracy. Consequently, 
the "levelling down process," so often 
complained of in democratic move- 
ments, is really part of a beneficent 
plan. Good men have held the theory 
that aristocracies are both desirable and 
inevitable. They have argued that 
social, educational and political insti- 
tutions should be shaped accordingly. 
Here is their programme : 

151 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

" To do away with social unrest and 
discontent, let the lower classes be 
taught that it is divinely ordered they 
should occupy their station; to aspire 
beyond the social rank of their parents 
is sinful. The professions are for the 
children of the middle class. Higher 
education should not be open to the 
poor. Too much education is not 
desirable for the masses. The civil 
service of the state should be recruited 
as largely as possible from th# better 
class. Trade unions are pestiferous. 
Those who prate about social equality 
are demagogues. All efforts to improve 
the condition of the lower classes are 
futile. 'The poor we will always have 
with us/ It is fore-ordained that the 
good things of earth are for the few, 
and that toil and tribulation are for the 
many. Otherwise this world were not 
a place of probation. It is but natural 
for the wealthy to attempt making a 
Paradise out of earth ; but for the many 
to seek to make this world pleasant is 
the manifestation of a dangerous kind 
of materialism." 

Much of this programme needs but to 
be stated to be rejected. Its philoso- 
phy belongs to the sixteenth and seven- 
152 



THE PEOPLE KING. 

teenth centuries, and the experience of 
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
has exposed its fundamental fallacy. 
The American Eepublic is the most 
striking evidence in refutation. The 
leading purpose here is to advance in 
the mass and not in aristocratic castes. 
To this end there must be universal 
education. To this end, also, every- 
thing which will improve the tastes of 
the common people, everything that 
will shield them from brutalization or 
vulgarization, everything which will 
make their condition equal to the con- 
dition of the best class in Europe, is to 
be encouraged. Our solicitude is not 
for the future of the upper ten thou- 
sand. It concerns itself wholly with 
the welfare of the million who are not 
keeping pace. We may need popular 
reform and educational movements 
rather than higher institutions of learn- 
ing. We need to provide for the mob 
rather than add to the comforts of 
praetorian guard. 

And the lesson that is to be taught is 
the heritage, which every man has in the 
good things of the earth, if he but 
deserves them. Nothing is too good 
for the most ordinary creature. He 
153 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

has a right to hope for things that the 
Czar can not have. He has the right 
to feel himself of a company of citizen 
sovereigns, such as the Czar is hardly 
fitted to enter. No education is too 
high for the poor man's son. No career 
is too ambitious for him. 

All of which sounds like spread- 
eagleism; but it is the simple truth of 
a happier epoch and a more Christian 
and brotherly theory of society. It is 
neither answered nor refuted by hitting 
it with an epithet. 



154 



THE HAED FACTS. 

a Balance Upon all great current questions 
8 with which public opinion is concerned 
there are weak men, assuming to lead, 
and proposing makeshifts. The labor 
problem demands attention, if it is to 
be touched at all, upon the basis which 
recognizes the mutual equality and 
independence of the laborer and the 
employer. 

Weak men propose a makeshift which 
runs back to the middle ages for its 
idea : The employer shall be filled with 
a sense of his moral duty toward his 
workingmen. They, in their turn, 
shall respect the rights of his property. 
A very pretty program if it would work. 
It is the chivalric noblesse oblige regime 
brought down to solve the hard facts of 
the present problem, utterly ignoring 
the close competition which rules the 
industrial world of to-day and dictates 
the wages and treatment of working- 
men; and utterly oblivious, too, of the 



155 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

unmitigated spirit of avarice which 
prescribes 

'•The plan 
That he may get who has the power, 
And he may keep who can." 

The drastic solution of the labor 
problem demands frugality from the 
laborer and the stamping out by legis- 
lation of the chief influences which 
make him poor and keep him poor. 
Force is upon the side of the working- 
man^ and in these days he is beginning 
to share also in the possession of Craft. 
Numbers, ballots, bullets and shrewd- 
ness will impel him to adopt effective 
measures. Legislation has its limita- 
tions, but its efficacy is hardly as 
narrow as doctrinaires and political 
economists have asserted. Legislation 
will not make a people virtuous, but it 
can stamp out primary schools of vice. 
It can not make the poor rich, but it 
can operate against the poor becoming 
poorer by operating against the rich 
becoming richer. It can check accum- 
ulation and promote distribution. It 
can regulate competition and promote 
co-operation. The presence of the rail- 
road lobbyist and the monopoly agent 
in the halls of congress is a recognition 
by these practical money-making con- 
156 



THE HARD FACTS. 

cerns that politics has a power over 
them which they will pay to escape. 
The capitalist may hold a whip over 
his workingmen in the vapory mine or 
in the crazy factory tower, but the 
enfranchised proletariat can rale capi- 
tal with a rod of iron in the supremer 
factory of legislation. Whether it is 
policy for the employer to play tyrant 
in his shop, and whether it is policy for 
mere members to play despot in legisla- 
tures, is another thing. But if either 
holds off, its forbearance will be predi- 
cated on policy and self-restraint, not 
upon duty based on powerless moral 
sanctions. Capital will be disinclined 
to oppress labor only when it ascertains 
that, by combination and law-making, 
labor can retaliate; and labor will be 
disinclined to embarrass capital only 
when it recognizes that this will injure 
its own interests. Nothing is so pro- 
motive of peace as a balance of power; 
and is it toward something of this con- 
dition that the various events of the 
present labor movement are blindly and 
gradually, but, nevertheless, surely 
tending. 

The Labor in its wrestle with capital 

Family, frequently employed the " boycott," 

157 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

whereupon offended morality launched 
against this new word the artillery of 
its phrases: "un-Christian" and "un- 
American." It seems that the cold 
edge of much ethical teaching is 
reserved for poverty and the under-dog 
in the wrestle. The adage respecting 
the difficulty of rich men entering the 
kingdom of Heaven must have some 
reference to the exclusiveness with 
which the applied gospel is preached to 
the poor. 

Now, here is an assemblage of godly 
rich men formed into a trust. It is 
not an In-God-We-Trust. Eather it is 
a deviPs trust. It exists for the pur- 
pose of regulating the law of supply and 
demand. This is a euphonism for the 
mild purpose of getting more from the 
public for their productions than the 
undoetored market would yield them. 
Anon, a brother Christian, goes into the 
same business. He puts up his capital, 
and he is willing to put in his honest 
toil. He asks but a fair field and an 
even opportunity. This is promptly 
denied him. He is the chosen victim 
of a fiendish boycott. He experiences 
all the inexorable hatred of a malevo- 
lent clan. Even the poor privilege of a 
158 



THE HARD FACTS. 

place in the conspiracy to rob the public 
is denied him. This is but a single 
instance of the unconvicted, unanathe- 
matized boycott which moves in the best 
society and occupies a distinguished 
place in the synagogue. 

How numerous the family of boy- 
cott are in the high places, moving 
under the name of Vanity, Exclusive- 
ness, Upper Tendom, "the Four Hun- 
dred," with their purse proud manners 
and their unfeeling "cuts" for their 
social inferiors and poorer imitators; 
how the family crops out in politics 
under the name of Know-Nothingism 
or similar faction, or how it sets up in 
business as monopoly, credit and syndi- 
cate, the most casual observer must 
know. Yet all the raps are for that 
end of the family in blue jeans, carry- 
ing a tin pail or wielding a spade. 

the n church! I T is not essential for the Church to 
be super-zealous in interposing in labor 
troubles, to instruct the workingmen 
that they have duties as well as rights, 
that contracts and property must be re- 
spected, and that there is a decalogue of 
"Thou shalt nots" which they must not 
transgress. 

159 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

Bosses would like to Have the Church 
do this whenever the industrial machin- 
ery gets out of order — disordered partly 
through the greed of the bosses them- 
selves. They would like to have the 
Church do police duty for them and 
preach to their pecuniary profit. 

The Church has lectured the work- 
ingman very frequently. But the 
Church must be impartial. The capi- 
talists and bosses stand in need of 
lecturing, too. Their avarice, their 
stock watering, their tariff jobbery, 
their wage cutting, their trusts, their 
arbitrary shutting down of factories, 
and their dozen other capital sins, need 
to be fitly rebuked. 

And one wa} r , and a most efficient 
way, of rebuking them is to let them 
take the consequences of their own 
avarice, unwisdom and injustice. If 
they sow the wind we do not see why 
the whirlwind should be anathematized 
for them. Experience is the best 
teacher for rich fools as well as for poor 
fools. If men pushed to the verge of 
starvation rebel, there is no reason why 
the Church should be brought in 
between them and the oppressors as a 
sort of buffer. Let the wealthy man's 
160 



THE HARD FACTS. 

church tell him his duties as well as his 
rights. The.poor man's church is con- 
tinually doing that for the working- 
man. 

"Man's inhumanity to man 
Makes countless numbers mourn/' 

It is not the masses, but the classes, 
who are inflicting most of the wrong. 
True, the masses need instruction so 
that they may be kept in order, but 
much more frequently the classes need 
instruction, and much less frequently 
they get it. The French peasantry 
were told to be submissive to their 
superiors and contented with their 
station, but the nobility brought out 
their pretty maxim, noblesse oblige, 
only for ornamental occasions. When 
the delayed tempest came the Church 
could not allay it — the altar came down 
with the throne in the social crash that 
ensued. 

The Church is not of, nor for, the 
things of this world. If the experience 
of history, if the common sense of 
society, if the courts, if the trade 
unions, if the interests of commerce 
itself, if the police can not keep the 
peace, then it is not the Church's 

161 



OUTLOOKS AND INSIGHTS. 

funeral. Society may go under, but 
the Church will stay. The sooner this 
is appreciated the better for all parties. 
The Church is not here to play police- 
man for either kings or labor lords. 



162 



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